The Marseille school, and why you can see it
We read the Tarot de Marseille: twenty-two major cards and fifty-six minor ones, the complete deck. This is not a point of vocabulary, because two schools do not read the same card the same way.
The simplest marker is the numbering: here Justice bears VIII and Strength XI. The English-speaking schools descended from the Golden Dawn swap them. Our texts are written in the Marseille school, and an automatic check rejects any content that arrives with the other numbering.
Marseille school, after the Nicolas Conver engraving (1760) and its reading by contemporary French-speaking tarot readers.
The shuffle, before you choose
The deck is shuffled before you see anything at all, by a complete pass, card after card, of the same kind you would do by hand. The generator behind it is no home-made randomness: it is a public, specified procedure that anyone can reimplement in another language.
One invisible yet decisive precaution: picking a rank at random by simply taking a division remainder slightly favours the first cards. We start the pick over whenever it lands in the range that would skew it, which makes every card exactly as likely as its neighbours.
Your own gesture counts
The shuffled deck never leaves our servers before the reveal. If it went to your browser, looking would be enough to read the cards before choosing them, and the gesture would lose its meaning. You see card backs, and you are the one who points to those that will be laid down.
That choice is your share of the draw, the equivalent of the hand that cuts the deck on a table. Each card's orientation, upright or reversed, is fixed at the shuffle, before you point, just as it is physically fixed the moment a card is laid face down. This holds for cards whose drawing is symmetric too: it is the draw that knows which way it lies, not the picture.
What you drew is what gets read
A draw is frozen the moment it is made, and it is kept as it is. It is never replayed when the reading is written. The difference from a birth chart is complete: two computations of the same chart give the same sky, whereas two shuffles give two draws, and nothing would signal the swap.
That is also why every reading opens on the record of your draw: the cards laid down, in their place and their orientation, and, where the spread has one, the card that was calculated rather than drawn. You can reread the text months later knowing exactly what it rests on.
The draw is a fact. Reading it is an art.
We always keep the two apart: the cards that came out can be observed, the meaning given to them belongs to a school, and we name that school.
Do my free introductory draw