Major Arcana

What it is

A standard 78-card tarot deck (Rider-Waite-Smith, the most widely used system and the one Mystica draws from) splits into two groups. The 22 major arcana are the named cards — The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, and on through The World — each numbered 0 through 21 and each standing for a significant life theme or turning point: The Tower for sudden upheaval, The Star for hope after hardship, The Wheel of Fortune for a shift in luck. The remaining 56 cards are the minor arcana, which cover day-to-day matters instead.

Because there are only 22 of them across a 78-card deck, a spread heavy in major arcana is traditionally read as a sign that the question at hand touches something significant, rather than a routine, everyday concern.

Worked example

Drawing The Tower in a reading is traditionally read as sudden, disruptive change — not a small setback, but a structure coming down so something truer can be rebuilt. Drawing an everyday minor-arcana card like the Three of Cups in the same position would instead point to a specific, smaller-scale social or celebratory moment.

How Mystica computes it

Every Tarot spread is drawn at random from the full 78-card deck (major and minor arcana together, each card independently eligible), using the exact upright/reversed meanings from A.E. Waite's public-domain "The Pictorial Key to the Tarot." No card type is weighted to appear more or less often — a major-arcana-heavy spread is a real, unweighted draw, not a built-in bias.