05 / Choosing a printer
Where to Get Tarot Cards Printed: Four Routes Compared
We read the published pages of the eight printers that rank for tarot printing on US search, on 21 September 2026. Not one of them publishes a single price that covers the cards, the box and the booklet together. Not one publishes a delivered total. Seven were readable; one could not be read at all.
That is the whole difficulty of shopping for this. Every quote you collect describes a slightly different object, so the cheapest per-deck number on the table is almost never the cheapest finished deck. This guide puts the published figures side by side, says exactly what each one covers, and gives you the four questions that make two quotes comparable.
Read from the live pages, 21 September 2026
Four routes.
Nobody else prices the whole deck.
- 0 of 8
- printers publish one price
covering cards, box and booklet - 0 of 8
- printers publish a delivered total
with shipping inside it - 1 to 500
- The spread of minimum orders
across the four routes - 12 decks
- The Dark Forest minimum
$226.80 delivered to the US
Every figure below is what that company’s own page published on 21 September 2026. Prices and minimums move; check them before you decide. Nothing here is a claim about quality, only about what each company states in public.
Where can I get my tarot cards printed?
Four routes take this work, and we read the published pages of the eight companies that rank for tarot printing on US search on 21 September 2026. Single-copy print-on-demand platforms have no stated minimum and sell one deck for $14.75 to $26.10, cards only. Made-to-order publishing services recommend 25 decks, 50 for printed tuck boxes, and publish no price at all. Overseas offset factories start at 200 to 500 decks, where the published figures run from $5.46 a deck at 200 down to about $1.11 at 10,000, for cards and a tuck box with the booklet priced separately and often ex-works. Short-run card printers are the fourth route: Dark Forest prints from 12 decks at $15.90 a complete set — 78 cards, a printed box and a 48-page booklet — $226.80 delivered to a US address. Of the eight pages, none publishes one price covering cards, box and booklet, and none publishes a delivered total.
| Route | Typical minimum | Published price at the smallest run | Box and booklet | Delivered total published | Proof · lead time · origin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Short-run card printers this is us |
12 decks | $15.90 at the 12 minimum · $10.90 at 192 | 78 cards, printed box and 48-page booklet in one price | Yes — $226.80 at 12 to a US address | Digital production proof · 15–20 business days plus 5–9 in transit · made in Ukraine |
| Single-copy print-on-demand platforms | None stated — 1 deck | $14.75 to $26.10 for one deck | Cards only, shrink-wrapped; box and booklet are paid add-ons, and some pages offer no booklet at all | No | Not part of the 21 September reading |
| Made-to-order publishing services | 25 decks recommended · 50 for printed tuck boxes | None published — quote only | Not stated; booklet offered as an unpriced add-on | No | Not part of the 21 September reading |
| Overseas offset factories | 200 to 500 decks | $5.46 a deck at 200 · about $1.11 at 10,000 · one publishes no figure at all | Cards and a tuck-end box; the booklet is a separately priced job | No — one page states its prices are ex-works and exclude shipping | Not part of the 21 September reading |
One of the eight pages could not be read on either of two attempts on 21 September 2026 — it returned a challenge page rather than content — so it is counted in the eight and carries no figures, rather than a guess. Where a company runs several price tables for different stocks and finishes, the figure shown for its route is the lowest one published anywhere on that page.
What the quoted price actually covers
A tarot deck that a customer will pay for is three printed objects: the cards, a box that holds them, and a booklet that explains them. Almost every price you will be quoted is for the first one only.
Reading the eight pages on 21 September 2026, four of them default to shrink-wrapped cards with no box at all, and list tuck boxes, rigid boxes, tins and bags as paid upgrades. Two more bundle a box into the headline price but sell the booklet as a separate print job with its own size, binding and paper choices. One publishes no price at all. None of the eight publishes one figure that covers all three.
Shipping is the second silent line. Not one of the eight shows a delivered total; one states in its own footnote that its prices are ex-works and exclude shipping entirely, and another shows postage as an unfilled placeholder in its quote panel. For a physical product that is heavy for its size and usually crosses an ocean, that is not a rounding error.
So the honest comparison is what the price covers, not what the price is. A $3.94 set price with no box and no booklet, plus freight, is not competing with a $15.90 complete deck; it is quoting a different product. Dark Forest publishes $15.90 for the complete set at 12 decks — 78 laminated cards, a standard folding box and a 48-page booklet — and $226.80 delivered to a US address, which is $190.80 of goods plus $36.00 of delivery at the published $3.00-a-deck estimate.
Where is the best place to print tarot cards?
There is no single best one, and any page that tells you otherwise is selling. The market sorts itself almost entirely by one number — the smallest run a company will accept — and that number decides which band you belong in.
| If you need | The band that fits | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| 1 to 11 decks | Single-copy platforms with no stated minimum | $14.75 to $26.10 for one deck, cards only. You can hold a copy; you cannot sell at a margin. |
| 12 to 192 decks | Short-run production | $15.90 to $10.90 a complete deck. The smallest quantity that is still a real, boxed, saleable product at a trade unit price. |
| 200 decks and up | Offset houses | $5.46 a deck at 200, falling to about $1.11 at 10,000 — before the box upgrade, the booklet and freight. The unit price is unbeatable and the commitment is the whole point. |
The trap is picking the band by unit price. A 200-deck minimum at $5.46 looks like it beats 12 decks at $15.90 until you notice you are being asked to fund $1,091 of inventory in a product nobody has bought yet, plus the box, plus the booklet, plus freight from another continent. A 500-deck minimum asks for several times that.
The band that fits is the one where you can absorb being wrong. If you have pre-orders, backers or a shelf that already sells tarot, go up a band. If you are finding out whether the deck works at all, the honest answer is the smallest run that produces a finished product you would be willing to sell — and on the eight pages we read, the lowest of those is 12.
Where can I print tarot cards?
Three kinds of supplier take this work, and they fail in different ways.
- Online card configurators. You build the deck in a browser, see a price immediately and upload files at the end. Fast and transparent on the cards; the box and the booklet are usually options you have to remember to switch on, and the price shown is rarely the price delivered.
- Offset print houses. Real commercial printing at real commercial minimums — 200 or 500 decks. Best unit economics in the market, quoted by email, and frequently priced ex-works, which means the number you were quoted is the number before a freight forwarder gets involved.
- Your local print shop. Worth one phone call and rarely worth more. Card stock, die-cut corners, lamination and a folding box are a different trade from posters and business cards, and most local shops will outsource the job anyway.
Watch for the word ex-works, or its abbreviation EXW, in a footnote. One of the eight pages we read states plainly that all of its listed prices exclude shipping from its own facility. That is normal in commercial print and completely fair — but it means a per-deck comparison against a delivered price is meaningless until you have the freight quote, the customs treatment and the destination in hand.
For what it is worth on our side of it: delivery here is charged per physical deck with insurance included, at a published $3.00 to the United States, $2.75 to Great Britain and $3.45 to Canada, Australia and Japan, and it is confirmed exactly for your address at checkout. Decks are made in Ukraine.
How can I get custom printed tarot cards?
Two routes exist, and they need very different things from you.
Your own artwork. You supply the illustrations and we print them. In file terms that is one clean card PDF, the booklet pages and the box panel, all at sizes the free templates already set for you — the exact page counts, canvas size, bleed and safe area are published on the file guide and templates page, with the dielines and clean production files free to download. The thing to test when you compare printers is whether a supplier will tell you those numbers at all before you have paid. If tarot is not actually your format, the same order path prices trading cards, playing cards, card games and flashcards too, each at its own card count — see every format compared in custom card deck printing.
Our design, your brand. You supply no illustrations at all. You choose an eligible 78-card design from the existing catalogue and put your own name, logo and packaging on it. Ready files and minor logo, company-name or QR-code edits are free; the three optional layout services are $50, $50 and $150 below 60 decks and included from 60 decks of one design, itemised in the box and booklet guide.
The order sequence here is worth comparing against whoever else you are considering, because it is unusual. You pay the full order through checkout first; you do not have to upload files or approve a proof before paying. After the order, we contact you by email to confirm the artwork and any preparation help, and production begins only after you approve the exact files. Plan for 3–4 weeks — 15 to 20 business days — for production and delivery after approval. That is a planning estimate, not a guaranteed date.
One clause worth reading on any printer’s terms, not only ours: what happens to your artwork. You keep ownership of what you supply. Permission to prepare and fulfil your order does not give us permission to resell or license your artwork, display it publicly, or train models on it. Reviewing twenty printer sites on 18 September 2026, we found none publishing a commitment either way; one published a non-disclosure agreement and nothing more.
Can you print out tarot cards?
Yes, on two conditions. The artwork has to be yours or genuinely free of rights — a great many decks circulating as free PDFs are not — and you have to be honest with yourself that what comes out is a prototype rather than a product. What a home printer can and cannot give you is set out in our self-publishing checklist; this guide is about where the real run gets made.
The useful place for it is before the money. Print your fronts at actual size, cut them, hold them, and you will find the three or four cards whose text is too small or whose key symbol falls under the trim before the print run does it for you at scale. Our free templates carry the safe area marked, which makes that test worth doing.
If you are weighing a batch against an automated one-at-a-time service rather than choosing between printers, that is a different decision and it has its own guide: batch printing versus print on demand.
Four questions that make two quotes comparable
Ask every printer the same four things in the same email, and the quotes stop being apples and oranges. All four came out of what the eight pages above leave unsaid.
- Does this price include the box and the booklet, or are they separate lines? On four of the eight pages the default packaging is shrink wrap. Ask for the figure with the box and booklet in it.
- What is the delivered total to my address, including insurance? None of the eight publishes one. Get it in writing before you compare unit prices, and ask whether the price is ex-works.
- What exactly do I have to supply, and in what format? Page count, page order, canvas size, bleed and safe area. A printer that cannot answer this in one message will cost you a fortnight later.
- What happens between payment and production? Is there a proof? Do you approve it? What can still be changed, and what does a change cost once production has started?
A fifth is worth asking if your deck matters to you: what does the contract say about your artwork afterwards. It is the question that costs nothing to ask and is the most expensive one to have skipped.
From a shortlist to an approved print run
If your artwork is finished and you want twelve to a hundred and ninety-two boxed decks you can actually sell, this is the short road: check your files against the free templates, choose your quantity, and place the order. $15.90 a complete set at 12, $226.80 delivered to a US address, with the proof approved by you before anything is printed.
If you are a shop rather than a creator, you do not need a print run at all — the wholesale catalogue holds 24 finished designs on the same ladder from the same 12-deck minimum, and what a deck costs you and what it sells for does that arithmetic.
Ready? Plan your own-artwork tarot print run, or put your brand on an existing design. Confirm your complete specification and final total before payment.
Before comparing quotes, it helps to know which kind of maker you are talking to. Who manufactures tarot cards sets out the three kinds and the seven questions that separate them.