Alicornutopia

The magic in this world runs on a combination of Tarot cards and #aesthetic. The basic idea is that magic-users channel their magic through a deck of Tarot cards and do a bunch of stuff about interpreting the symbolism to decide how the magic is going to work.

How effective you are at magicing depends on a few different things:

• how well your tarot deck conforms to your aesthetic preferences
• how much magic you have built up in your deck
• how much (entirely non-magical) skill and practice you have at interpreting symbols and constructing narratives around them
• how much magic power you have (natural ability varies, grows with practice, just like muscle strength)

There are a few different things you can do with your tarot deck:

• "reading": just like the readings people do with tarot cards in the real world. there's a few different formats and you can try inventing your own but that's not recommended unless you're a very advanced practitioner AND have strong aesthetic preferences for some format. you can do a reading on just about anything, a person or situation or item or whatever. helps if you have something linked to whatever you're doing the reading on, just to focus in on. most of the skill involved is about figuring out how to interpret the cards you get. readings can tell you stuff about the future or the present but are not great at telling you stuff about the past.
• "writing": you focus it in on something just like you do for the reading but instead of trying to find information you're trying to alter the thing. again there's a few different formats which correspond more or less to the reading ones. you draw the cards and then by imposing an interpretation on them you can actually alter whatever thing you're doing a writing on. the more elegant/plausible/aesthetically pleasing you find your interpretation, the less power it takes. you can also use a lot of extra power to swap two cards around or invert a card or discard one and draw a new card.
• "casting": this is the thing you do when you're actively in combat. you charge a card with power (can be done in advance) and then tear it in half to release that power to do something appropriate to that card. again the more strained the link between what you're doing and the card, the less efficiently you use the power. once a card is torn in half it cannot be fixed ever it's kaput. luckily you're not required to use cards from your personal deck, you can use whatever spares you have lying around it's okay.
  for all of these, the better your cards work for your #aesthetic the better results you get and the less power you have to use.

magic in this world is totally a known thing! it's like being an astronaut or something in that lots of kids want to do it because it sounds cool but then they find out it takes a lot of work and a pretty specific type of person and so not a lot of people actually end up doing it. obviously a lot of being a magic practitioner in this world is creating a deck that you find aesthetically pleasing!

decks have to match up to the traditional tarot card names (hanged man/sun/lovers etc.), but the images can be whatever you want as long as you see a correspondence. (as usual if you find the correspondence strained your deck is not going to work very well, while if you think it's really neat and pretty it's going to work great.) rider-waite is considered the standard deck because it's the deck that's used by the US military. there's several other famous decks, and roughly a gazillion different mass-produced decks you can buy. you won't use those if you're a serious practitioner but a middle-schooler can totally use a Lord of the Rings deck from Walmart to get a hint who might have a crush on her if she thinks the aesthetic works for her.

lots of kids play around with doing little magic stuff. since casting destroys cards you end up with a lot of partial decks, and you want to build a deck that really works for your aesthetic anyway so you usually pick and choose cards from a bunch of different decks. trading tarot cards is a Major Thing like pokemon or something but even bigger. (adults don't do that so much b/c they can just buy the decks, the nice ones can run out of a middle-schooler's price range but not out of an adult's until you're talking custom art.)

there's a fair number of adult hobbyists but if you want to be serious about doing magic you do college and then grad school in it. if you can't afford that you can sign on for a ROTC-like thing and the military will pay your way through an undergrad degree in tarot and give you their own training and then you're required to serve with them for a while. they require everyone to use the standard rider-waite deck which reduces spellpower but means that they can standardize stuff and have everyone practice the same castings and generally be more predictable.

when you've been using the same deck for a while it starts to build up a magic aura. this gives a minor boost to your spells with that deck but mostly it does stuff for the deck itself. the effects include:

• the deck starts resisting damage. you can always tear a card in half if you want to destroy it but this means that it won't wear out from too much shuffling or be ruined if you drop it in the mud and so forth.
• the deck starts being uncooperative if anyone but you tries to handle it. at early stages they'll fumble it a lot, if they try to draw cards they'll draw death over and over or something because the deck is annoyed, stuff like that. then people start not being able to draw cards at all and getting papercuts if they try to handle it. once you've built up a lot of power the deck will do stuff like actually flying away if anyone but you tries to touch it.
• it starts doing neat little effects when you use it! like you can set cards in mid-air and they'll just float there and you can do a reading vertically in mid-air instead of on a flat surface. cards have glowy haloes when you're using them to do magic stuff. fireworks when you shuffle. that sort of thing, whatever you think is aesthetically appropriate.
  you start to be able to do minor alterations on cards with your mind. like if your hanged man was screaming and you decide he should actually be singing you can just draw that card and focus on it for a while and it will change and come out exactly how you imagined it. very convenient.
• if you want to get a particular card out of your deck and aren't actually casting a spell (gotta take luck of the draw if you're casting a spell) you can just cut the deck and that card will be on top.
• deck starts doing technically impossible stuff during readings and writings if it's appropriate. main thing is that if the most accurate answer to a reading involves the same card in multiple locations it'll just give you more than one of that card. don't ask questions. just shuffle it back in.

altering your deck (making changes to cards, taking one card out and substituting another) reduces the aura a bit but it's pretty much always worth it to make the deck be better for your aesthetic. if you switch to a totally new deck you start from zero but it's not disastrous, you still have all your other magic abilities, just do a bunch of practicing with your new deck to get it back up to where it was. most serious practitioners stick to just the one deck but some of them prefer to have several different ones for different situations or one main one and a couple of backups. hobbyists often have multiple decks.

so. magic school! most colleges have a "pre-tarot" degree (like pre-med, pre-law) but lots of people will just do, like, an english or art degree instead. basically the point of undergrad tarot is to really develop your aesthetic sense, learn a lot of stuff about how symbolism works, get a broad artistic and literary grounding so you have lots of stuff to draw from for your aesthetic and symbolism (much easier to think of plausible interpretations for a writing if you know what red symbolizes in fifty different artistic traditions), and learn technical drawing/painting skills so you can create your own tarot cards (because you really have to if you're going to be serious about it).

then you apply to tarot grad school. they take people from pre-tarot and also from english and art and so forth. instead of writing a dissertation you create your tarot deck! you may not make the whole thing but you'll do the major arcana at least, and then you keep working on perfecting it basically indefinitely (because for one thing your aesthetic may shift as you get older). you go to lots of talks where people explain what they're doing with their decks and why. most people who are serious about it stick with the standard cards and just play around with the images but some serious people and lots of hobbyists will do "themed decks" where, like, the hanged man is gandalf and the priestess is galadriel etc. (this is considered gauche in academic circles.) there's conferences and conventions (exactly the same thing but conferences are Serious and Academic while conventions are Silly Immature Hobbyist Business) where you go and attend panels and talks and commission art from vendors and so on. (serious people won't use someone else's art for the major arcana in their main deck but they'll often use it for minor arcana that they haven't thought of a good idea for yet, or for side decks, or for castings.)

if you try to cheat in any way the magic gets pissed off and stops working altogether. so no stacking the deck, taking cards out, marking cards. you can design the backs of your cards but have to be v careful that you can't tell them apart so people usually do a flat color or something pre-printed until their deck has enough magic built up that it'll automatically adjust any little irregularities to match. similarly you have to be careful not to scuff your cards in a way you can tell apart until they get magically sturdy.

being a tarot user is considered Pretty Nerdy. possibly cool nerdy, but still nerdy. getting a degree in it is like being a physics professor; being one of the top users is like being stephen hawking; being a hobbyist is like being a star trek fan; being a serious hobbyist is like being a star trek cosplayer.

unlike in the real world, tarot was developed in china around the ninth century along with the first playing cards. it spread somewhat more rapidly than playing cards in the real world because everyone wanted to get in on the magic stuff. there were some pretty wild variations on the type and number of cards but it settled down pretty quickly on the one set that seemed to objectively Work Best for magic, and then that became embedded in the cultural consciousness and the other sets pretty much stopped working altogether. people who have really weird aesthetic preferences will still sometimes experiment with some of the weird old sets, and there's probably some tribes somewhere in mongolia using something bizarre, but in general that just doesn't work as well.

there are lots of jobs available if you get a doctorate in tarot! one obvious choice is going into tarot academia. you get to hang around other tarot users all the time and swap ideas, and you have university resources if you want to research tarot styles in twelfth century switzerland or something, and there's lots of talks and conferences to go to. you get grants by doing projects that the government is willing to endow funding for (like, "please do a reading on our next moon mission OK") and then you use the funding to do the stuff you're actually interested in. also you publish papers on the Theory of Tarot and teach classes and stuff.

the other option is pretty much going into industry. lots of different places like hiring tarot users. banks would obviously like to but there's roughly a million regulations on "tarot insider trading" and also tarot just doesn't work that well for that sort of thing, partly because the cards/user's subconscious is like "uh this is not #aesthetic why are we not rescuing princesses" and partly because it's a lot easier to get meanings like "your nemesis has a darkness inside him born of fear" out of tarot spreads than "the dow is going to rise five points next quarter." if you really want to sell your soul (metaphorically) you can help back someone's political campaign, there's again roughly a million regulations but these are rampantly ignored. obviously the army is an option but you don't usually do that if you have a doctorate because they're a Pain to deal with. at least if you have that much expertise they'll let you use your own deck and work as some kind of special agent instead of part of a Tarot Unit who all have to use the standard deck and standard spells and stuff. big cities will usually have a Tarot Emergency Response Team who get to help with fires and rescue kittens and stuff. some hospitals have a tarot person on staff but a lot of them are weirded out by it and don't. (it is totally effective though.) you can always freelance but that's more of a hobbyist thing.

there's obviously regulations about how tarot can be used but honestly it's pretty similar to normal laws. if you're using tarot in public and a policeman tells you to quit you quit unless you have a certification (you get one automatically with your doctorate or can apply) and even then you probably just avoid trouble and move along. don't murder people. that sort of thing. you can use tarot on the superbowl if you want but there's millions of people doing the same thing so don't get your hopes up. various competitions involve more showboating and pandering to the fanbase than in the real world because if every dude in the country pulls out his old deck and does a write in your favor it can definitely sway the balance.

tarot users often wear silly costumes, since being a tarot user heavily selects for having a really intense aesthetic, and then once it became a Thing there was no reason not to. obviously this does not apply to tarot users in the army.

different magical traditions! the western tradition is very much about making your own tarot deck, the one that Reflects You As A Person. the eastern tradition involves more studying the tarot decks of the great masters, figuring out the symbolism, learning to really appreciate the beauty, carefully copying them by hand until you can do it perfectly, meditating on them, and then when you completely understand them making tiny alterations. both methods end up working about equally well on average, of course it varies by person which they find works best for them.

evil magic users: tarot users are selected for being Dramatic and #Aesthetic anyway, so there's a fair number of teenagers going I Am The Darkest and Edgiest, Fear Me. They mostly get ignored until they do something worse than vandalism and then get arrested and told they can have a suspended sentence if they Use Your Talents For Something Productive, For Pete's Sake. The real danger is people sitting quietly at home doing writings to help a bank robbery or whatever, because they're basically impossible to catch or make charges stick even if you do.

you can make objects with permanent magical effects but not objects that do magical effects of their own. so yes turning your cat invisible, no making a ring that turns the wearer invisible. also tarot cards are much more inclined to do “only visible to the pure of heart” than “invisible” so you’ll need to burn more energy to do the latter. lots of hobbyists will have casual magical items like a Kitchen Knife of Undulling Sharpness (+2). magical items lose their powers after your death but if you want to make a super-awesome artifact that will last forever you can destroy an entire fully-charged deck instead of a single card. you can do an object that only works for one person for less power than an object that only works for a certain sort of person for less power than an object that works for everyone.

Tarot magic is in general Super Happy to conform to your personal aesthetic. like when casting, you start out having to tear the card, but after a while if you prefer you can just form an intention and the card spontaneously combusts or folds into a paper airplane and dive-bombs the target of the spell and explodes or tears itself into tiny shreds or disappears in a puff of smoke. your spells can have pretty special effects that work for you. you don’t usually have total control over what these look like but that’s mostly just a matter of not wanting to bother, if you really care you can focus on that but it takes some focus away from the spell. and they’ll always be something you like and you can make them a habit over time.