Unusual Animal Messages Oracle

This is a great deck! Even if you feel like you've seen enough animal decks, don't be too quick to push this one aside. The pastel-colored illustrations are gentle and clear. The animals are depicted in a natural yet soft, non-threatening way. Even the animals that might seem scary or gross, like the vampire bat or the rat, seem harmless, or even joyful. That being said, some animals just can’t be helped (looking at you, Goblin Shark). I love the educational aspect. I’ve learned many interesting and wonderful peculiarities of all 52 animals in this deck. For example that a dung beetle uses the stars in the night sky to navigate, which is illustrated beautifully on the box (as well as the card). These peculiarities are translated to teachings regarding the human experience, and for each animal there’s a concrete "Try this" piece of practical advice. While the “Try this” sections are (mostly) valuable and clear, I’ve found it to be rewarding to engage with the animal descriptions, as they’ve greatly enhanced the depth of several readings. For example, for the Sea Pen, Manda writes: "It's [...] a colony of smaller animals called polyps that [...] work together as a single unit. The main polyp forms the stalk by losing its tentacles and anchoring itself to the seafloor, while the supporting polyps form the branches." Which, in one particular reading for someone who felt overworked and could identify as a “many-tentacled polyp” in a group, allowed for more specific advice: be grateful for the chance to drop your tentacles. Focus on your position, and allow others to take responsibility for their own positions. Offer support from your position, ask for support from your position. While it’s a lovely deck, there are a few drawbacks. The cards feel a bit flimsy. While mediocre cardstock is to be expected in this price range, I feel they should have gone with something a bit sturdier. The cardboard insert that should keep the cards in place inside the box, actually leaves room for some of the cards to slip between the insert and the box. When you take the deck out of the box, there are usually one or two cards left stuck inside, which is easy to miss. The cards are laminated and glossy. While I don’t like glossy cardstock in general, I think a (semi-) matte finish would have complemented the softness of the artwork. That being said, the card’s aren’t sticky at all and don’t bunch together, which is actually great. Therefore they shuffle quite well (both riffle and overhand), which is not always the case with matte cardstock. A bigger issue is that the cards aren’t numbered and the guidebook is not in alphabetical order. This means that when you want to look up a card description (which is probably always), you’ll have to go through the book page by page until you find it. I’ve solved it by writing the page number on the card with a thin-tipped permanent marker. All that being said, if the cards would have been numbered, I would have given the deck 5 stars. As it stands, I still heartily recommend it!

- bensmakman