A reader slides the first card from the box. Instead of a knight on a horse or a robed figure holding a cup, they find a black-and-white drawing of a wolf, its head tilted, one eye a hollow circle. The card says “The Chariot” at the bottom. For a moment, the familiar framework of tarot seems to have slipped sideways. It has not. The structure remains intact. What changed is the language.
The Wild Unknown Tarot (Kim Krans, 2012) is a modern deck that replaces the human figures and narrative scenes of the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition with minimalist animal and botanical imagery, while preserving the same 78-card structure, suits, and major arcana sequence. Its stark black, white, and muted palette forces the reader to engage with pure symbol rather than story. This is not a new system. It is a translation of an old one into a different visual dialect.
Where the Wild Unknown Came From
Kim Krans, an artist and writer based in the Pacific Northwest, began drawing the deck in 2011 as a personal project. She self-published it in 2012 through her website, printing a small run that sold out within weeks. HarperOne picked it up for mass publication in 2016, and it has since become one of the best-selling tarot decks of the twenty-first century.
The traditional deck it stands beside is the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS), first published in 1909 by William Rider & Son. The cards were designed by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Smith’s illustrations are the first to show full scenes for the minor arcana, not just suit symbols. That innovation made the RWS the standard for English-language tarot for over a century. For a full breakdown of this foundational system, see our Rider-Waite-Smith guide.
Krans worked from that standard. She has said in interviews that she learned tarot using the RWS and wanted to create a deck that stripped away the Victorian costumes and Christian allegories to reach what she called the “raw archetypes” underneath. The result is a deck that looks nothing like Smith’s work but follows its logic exactly.
How the Symbolism Shifts
Traditional RWS cards tell stories. The Fool walks off a cliff with a small dog at his heels. The Tower explodes with lightning and falling figures. The Ten of Cups shows a happy family under a rainbow. Every card is a miniature narrative with human actors, props, and a clear emotional tone.
The Wild Unknown removes the humans. The Fool becomes a small egg perched on the edge of a cliff. The Tower is a lightning bolt striking a bare tree. The Ten of Cups shows ten cups arranged in a rainbow arc with no people at all. The absence of faces forces the reader to project their own emotional content onto the card. You cannot read the expression of a character because there is none.
Animals carry the archetypal weight. The Empress is a pregnant deer. The Emperor is a ram. Justice is a lion. Death is a snake shedding its skin. The choice is not random. Each animal carries a set of associations that overlap with the traditional meaning. The snake for Death is obvious: renewal through shedding. The lion for Justice speaks to authority and raw discernment. But the animal also introduces new layers. A deer is not a human mother; it is a creature of the forest, watchful and preyed upon. That changes how we read the Empress. For the symbolic meanings of these creatures, consult the glossary of animal symbolism.
Color is reduced to a three-tone palette: black, white, and a muted rust-red for accent. The RWS uses bright blues, yellows, reds, and greens. Krans’s minimalism removes the emotional cues that color provides. A red sky in the RWS Ten of Wands signals burden and exhaustion. In the Wild Unknown, the same card is black and white with a single red line. The reader must supply the feeling.
Reading with the Wild Unknown: Same Bones, Different Muscle
We sit with a querent and lay out a Celtic Cross. The cards fall: The High Priestess, the Two of Swords, the Page of Cups. In the RWS, the High Priestess sits between two pillars, a scroll in her lap, a crescent moon at her feet. In the Wild Unknown, she is a white owl with spread wings, perched on a crescent moon. The meaning is the same: hidden knowledge, intuition, the threshold between conscious and unconscious. But the owl adds a nocturnal, predatory quality. The High Priestess is not just a keeper of secrets. She hunts in the dark.
Readers who work with the Wild Unknown often describe a more intuitive, less memorized approach. Because the cards do not show human interactions, the narrative is not given. You build it from the symbols. This can be freeing for experienced readers who feel constrained by the RWS’s fixed stories. It can be disorienting for beginners who rely on those stories to learn.
The deck’s guidebook, written by Krans, offers short poetic interpretations rather than the lengthy keyword lists of traditional manuals. It does not give reversed meanings. Krans encourages readers to see reversals as “shadow” aspects of the upright meaning, not as separate positions. This is a departure from the RWS tradition, where reversals are standard for many readers.
How It Compares to Other Modern Decks
The Wild Unknown is often grouped with other minimalist or animal-based decks, but it is not the first. The Thoth Tarot (Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris, completed 1944) also uses abstract, symbolic imagery, though it is far more complex and color-coded. The Marseille Tarot (15th century) uses simple line drawings and no narrative scenes at all. The Wild Unknown is closer to Marseille in its refusal to illustrate stories, but it keeps the RWS’s minor arcana scenes (the Ten of Cups shows ten cups, not just pips).
What sets the Wild Unknown apart is its cultural moment. It arrived when tarot was moving from esoteric circles into mainstream wellness and self-help. Its clean, minimalist aesthetic made it a gateway deck for a generation that found the RWS’s medieval costumes and Christian symbolism off-putting. It is also one of the few decks that has been widely adopted by both traditional tarot readers and those who use cards purely for journaling or meditation.
For an overview of how different decks approach symbolism, visit the tarot hub for comparisons and reading guides.
What People Get Wrong
The most common misconception is that the Wild Unknown is a completely new tarot system. It is not. The suits are Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles. The major arcana runs from 0 to XXI in the same order. The court cards are King, Queen, Knight, and Page. If you know the RWS, you know the Wild Unknown. You just have to learn the deck’s visual vocabulary.
Another mistake is assuming the deck is only for beginners because it looks simple. The minimalism actually demands more from the reader. There is no human face to read, no background detail to interpret. You have to sit with a single image and extract meaning from a wolf’s posture or a tree’s bare branches. That is harder than reading a card that shows a person crying.
Some also believe the deck is “genderless” or “nonbinary” because it lacks human figures. The animals are often gendered in the guidebook (the Empress is a doe, the Emperor a ram). The deck does not escape gender. It just displaces it onto animals.
FAQ
Is the Wild Unknown Tarot based on the Rider-Waite-Smith system?
Yes. It follows the same 78-card structure, suit names, and major arcana order, with meanings that align closely with the RWS tradition.
Can I use traditional tarot meanings with the Wild Unknown?
Absolutely. The animal and botanical symbols are chosen to evoke the same archetypes. Most readers find the traditional meanings transfer directly once they learn the deck’s visual language.
Is the Wild Unknown good for beginners?
It can be, but it requires a willingness to work intuitively. Beginners who prefer clear narrative scenes may find the RWS easier. Those who respond to visual symbolism and minimalism often learn faster with the Wild Unknown.
Why does the Wild Unknown have no human figures?
Kim Krans wanted to remove the cultural and historical baggage of human representation, allowing the archetypes to speak more directly through animals and natural forms.
The Wild Unknown is not a rebellion against tradition. It is a translation. The same grammar, the same syntax, a different vocabulary. For readers who have worn grooves into the RWS’s images, it offers a way to see the cards fresh. For those new to tarot, it provides a clean entry point that does not demand medieval history lessons. Both decks sit on the same shelf. Both speak the same language. The difference is in what the listener hears.
For more on how modern decks reinterpret the tradition, see our guide to tarot symbolism. If you want to explore the animal archetypes used in the Wild Unknown, the glossary of symbolic animals covers the meanings of deer, snakes, owls, and wolves. And for a deeper look at the RWS system that underlies both decks, read our Rider-Waite-Smith analysis.