Ephemere is a deck of 80 hand painted cards. each adorned with pale gold foil on both front and back. Just like its spiritual counterpoint TrueBlack, each deck features the same iconic “rose petal” feel and comes with a magnetic storage box and a little white booklet co-written by Arthur Wang and Mat Auryn.
Ephemere represents the stories, traditions, and heritages that humans create and pass forth in their journey to conquer the most eternal and timeless of enemies; the ephemerality and temporality of life. With scenes that evoke feelings of a half-remembered dream, figures fading into mist, and an unbounded timelessness, these paintings reflect the fleeting quality of our lives and the memories we leave behind.
Inspired by odysseys and epics of old, the major arcana cards have been reimagined as a “hero’s journey” in place of the classic “fool’s journey”. Just as the Epic of Gilgamesh centers around a hero’s struggle to conquer death and his own ephemerality, our deck recants a timeless story of determination, struggle, failure, and how we pick up the pieces to continue onwards. Realizing our minuscule stature on a galactic and eternal scale, what pieces do we choose to leave behind?
Literary classics, historic mythology, and ancient anthropological findings inspire the cards of this deck. The majority of these major arcana cards retain strong parallels to traditional Rider Waite-Smith counterparts, though a small number are completely new.
