Hello! I'm Shing Yin Khor, an award winning game designer and cartoonist, and the creator of this tarot deck. The Strange Beast Tarot conjures up a fascinating and beautiful bestiary of odd forms, curious gods, and creatures who are unsure about their place in this universe(but are still trying to find a place to belong). This is a secretive but enthusiastic deck. It is sometimes funny and sometimes moody, sometimes quiet and introspective, and sometimes excruciatingly literal.

This tarot deck comes from my illustration and cartooning work with my long standing fascination with tarot as both a divination and game mechanism. The deck is based on my last decade of drawing and sculpting these otherworldly creatures, which have been featured in solo sold-out gallery shows, exhibited internationally, and published in my own comics and postcard books. I've always gravitated towards drawing strange beasts to explore my own discomforts with existing in my own body and mind, but they've also become totemic and familiar to me. I am not a person who takes to divination naturally, but the process of creating this deck makes me feel more in touch with my own intuition.

Some of these beasts are fairly reminiscent of animals we know, some are stranger and ghostlier. Some are humanoid, but uncomfortable about it. The suits are interpreted as objects familiar to my life, that I know the shape of by holding. Swords are needles and daggers and scalpels. Wands are flags and arrows and matchsticks and sharpened pencils. Coins are sand dollars, arcade tokens, and bottle caps. Cups are tiny glass bottles, teacups, and rice bowls.

Each card design was hand-painted in beautifully rendered watercolor, with light hand-drawn digital editing, and all cards are intentionally designed to retain a rustic and handmade feel. All borders are hand-drawn and all text is hand-lettered. Every card is fully illustrated, including the entire Minor Arcana.

In a creative world that feels overwhelmingly  dominated by computerized precision and AI generated imagery, every card in this deck bears the artifact of hand-craft - the blue sketch lines that still ghost beneath the ink, the slightly uneven borders, the stray splotches of watercolour paint. 

The materials used to make this deck are: Holbein and Case for Making watercolors, light blue Colerase pencils, Uni Mitsubishi Vermilion and Prussian Blue pencils, a fountain pen(an extra fine Kaweko with Platinum Carbon Ink, which is waterproof), vintage Tria markers, with Procreate and Photoshop for ink highlights, hand-lettering and editing.

The box, as well as the additional divination materials for the deck have not yet been designed - follow along with the campaign for a peek into the design process! I am excited to document and share my production process with you! 

This crowdfund is paying for:

• Two months of largely uninterrupted work time, to finish the remaining 30 cards in the deck, edit final art, and prepare all my files for production. I expect the cards to be fully painted by the end of March, and would love to be able to be able to devote April to prototyping and production.
• Prototyping costs with several vendors, so I can make the deck at the level of quality and thoughtfulness I am known for.
• Printing and production costs of making this deck. This is a lot of money. 
• My incredible fulfillment partners, White Squirrel, who have shipped and fulfilled several of my projects on time.
• Creative work and physical labor costs, for talented design collaborators I am hiring to help me make this the best deck I can.

The rewards for this campaign are deliberately simple, which will allow me to focus on making the deck the most beautiful and interesting deck I can. The primary reward is the deck itself, but there are some limited options for random three card sets, as well as personalized written(typed on a typewriter) readings! 

The Diviner Edition is a somewhat indulgent(and very limited) edition. The card deck will be hand-wrapped for gift giving, and will be accompanied by some additional divination mechanisms, such as a divination coin, an altar cloth, and some other surprises.

Note: For easier fulfillment, deck-only orders will be fulfilled by my fulfillment partners, White Squirrel, while personalized readings, three card readings and Diviner editions will be mailed out of my woodshop in El Sereno, CA. Sadly, this means that we will not be able to combine shipping costs, but you do get to receive extra treats in the mail!

$50, 000 

Meeting this goal will allow me to make the fanciest deck of my dreams. This includes gilded edges, gold foil on the boxes, an upgrade to a two part rigid box, and a printed reading guide that includes my notes on making the deck! 

$75, 000

More art! Meeting this goal will allow me to design and edit an accompanying zine of tarot games and writings from designers, poets and writers such as Caro Asercion, Emerald Barkley, Kate Dollarhyde, Amal El Mohtar, Emily Friedman, Sarah Gailey, Taliesin Jaffe, Jeeyon Shim, Alyssa Wong and more. 

These works will be compiled in a mailed zine supplement that will be automatically included for everyone who pledges for a complete deck of cards, and be supplemented by my behind-the-scenes notes and art on making this deck.

I am a Malaysian-American installation artist, cartoonist, and experience designer, obsessed with physical storytelling artifacts, and the evolution of tradition and ritual. I build large scale immersive installation work, like  space apothecaries in the desert, and space salvage stations in the woods, but in pandemic times, I began looking for ways to bring the intent and atmosphere of these narrative experiences into smaller home spaces, and to intertwine them with the rituals of everyday life. Now I build marionettes and fortune telling devices, and strange little keepsake games and epistolary narratives; I'm a National Book Award finalist and have won Eisner and Ignatz awards for my comics, and Indiecade awards for my games. 

My game design work is rooted in my work as a builder and artist - keepsake games centered on the bridge between physical making and traditional tabletop RPGs,  kind and strange emotional connections, and ritual. I am the designer and creator  the keepsake embroidery game  A Mending (which raised $190k on Kickstarter and was fulfilled on time), The Gentle Oraclebird(presented at Indiecade 2019 and 2020) and Remember August, the winner of Best Tabletop Game at Indiecade 2022.