In the last year or two there has been a huge problem with people in China making counterfeit copies of existing tarot and oracle card decks. They sell them for cheap on unscrupulous websites like TEMU, AliExpress, SHEIN, and others. If you are planning to purchase any card deck, please avoid the aforementioned websites like the plague. Almost everything on them is counterfeit. What they are doing deprives the actual creators (like myself) of our livelihood.

The only place to currently purchase the authentic version of the Enchanted Art Oracle Card deck is via my Etsy shop.

When these counterfeiters got ahold of my deck, my sales dropped to almost zero. It has been devastating. I have a few other decks in the works, but this makes me doubt whether I should even pursue them. This is very sad. I will not let them stop me, but the amount of extra effort to fight back in attempt to stop them takes away from time that I would otherwise spend creating new works. If you are a card deck creator, or know one, please have them reach out to me as I am banding together with other creators to stop these illegal imposters. There is power in numbers.

Sometimes a regular person will sell a used copy of an authentic deck on a website like Mercari. This is fine and reasonable. But the counterfeiters are also using sites like EBay to sell the illegal counterfeits. I had to do a take down process with EBay that took much longer than it should have, but they did eventually remove the counterfeit listings.

There are some websites like Magick.com that I believe are innocent 3rd parties who being sold counterfeit decks wholesale. Sites like this are willing to take down the counterfeit listings as soon as they are notified, as was my experience with Magick.com.

There is a great video on YouTube by Lady Emerald Tarot, she covers in detail what to look for and how to tell if a deck you are considering is counterfeit or authentic. I recommend watching it if you’d like to learn more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzYdh6A7FhY

Some of the points she lists are exactly the points that I observe, such as:

• No Guide Book (for decks that come with one in the authentic version)
• QR Code on the box to “download the free guidebook” (printing the guide book adds cost, they sell the decks cheaper this way)
• Tuck Box – I.e. decks that come w/a magnetic box, or my deck that comes in a bag, will come in a flimsy “tuck box”
• Flimsy Card Stock
• No Guilding (when the authentic deck has guilded edges)
• Lower quality images
• Possibly smaller cards than original deck

She also brings up a new trend I have noticed which is decks created by A.I. that are being sold on Amazon. I found some that do not even list an author or artist’s name, so this is another thing to look for.

Tuck boxes are cardboard boxes where the top “tucks” into the rest of the box. The authentic version of the Enchanted Art Oracle comes with no box, and no guidebook. They made a cheap tuck box so if you see a listing with the box, it is COUNTERFEIT. The authentic deck that I sell on Etsy comes with an organza bag (see photos below). At first they used my actual Etsy listing photos, which I took myself on velvet backdrops. Now they have some of their own photos on a white background (also see below).

The authentic version of my deck has a card at the end with writing on both sides; one side is about the deck, the other side is about the creator (me). The counterfeiters removed the information about me (of course) and put the info about the deck on the back of the box. But they REMOVED my website at the bottom and replaced it with their stupid QR code – despite the fact that my deck doesn’t even come with a guidebook! I intentionally did not include one because it would have significantly raised the price and I wanted to keep the deck affordable. I use local printing companies in the United States which is much more expensive than printing in China. Unfortunately most of the major publishing companies print their card decks in China, so they likely already have the die cutters for many of the common deck sizes over there, making counterfeiting that much easier for them. In fact, it was after I revised my deck and changed it to standard tarot size (hoping to find a more affordable printing company w/an existing die cutter for the rounded corners) that my deck started being plagiarized.

The only place to purchase the authentic version of the Enchanted Art Oracle is via my Etsy shop. Thank you for supporting small businesses and independent creators!

~ Mimi Pettibone