Random Tarot Card Generator

This random tarot card generator draws one to ten cards at random from a full 78-card Rider-Waite-Smith deck and tells you what each one means. You choose how many cards, which part of the deck to draw from and whether reversals are included, and every card links to its full meaning.

Jump to a section:

• How the generator works
• Learning the cards with random draws
• Random cards as journaling prompts
• Practising card combinations
• Prompts for writing and art
• A quick question, and when to use something else
• A random draw vs a physical shuffle
• The odds, worked out
• What a random draw can’t do
• Frequently asked questions

How the Random Tarot Card Generator Works

Pick a number of cards from 1 to 10 and a pool to draw from: the full deck of 78, the 22 cards of the Major Arcana, the 56 cards of the Minor Arcana, the 16 court cards on their own, or the 14 cards of a single suit. Then press the button.

Behind the button, three things happen:

1. The randomness comes from your browser. The generator uses the browser’s cryptographic random number source, the same kind used for security keys, rather than a simple repeating formula. Nobody can steer which card comes up.
2. Cards are drawn without replacement. Once a card is out, it can’t come up again in the same draw, just as with a real deck.
3. Each card has a 1 in 3 chance of being reversed when reversals are switched on, which they are by default. Untick the box and every card comes up upright.

You then see the cards, followed by each card’s short meaning, keywords and a link to its full page.

Nothing is sent anywhere. The draw happens on your own device, and when you leave the page the cards are gone. Your settings (how many cards, which pool, reversals on or off) are remembered in your browser so they’re ready next time; the cards themselves aren’t kept. Press “Generate again” as often as you like; there’s no limit.

New to reversals? Switch them off until the upright meanings feel familiar. The meanings of all 78 cards cover both directions for when you’re ready.

Learning the Cards with Random Draws

Studying the cards in order, from the Fool to the King of Pentacles, gives you a neat list and a poor memory. A random draw fixes that, because it tests you the way a reading will: one card at a time, with no clue from the card before.

The flashcard method

1. Draw one card.
2. Before you scroll down to the meaning, say out loud what you think the card means, in one sentence. Saying it forces you to commit; thinking it lets you fudge.
3. Now read the short meaning and keywords. Were you close, partly right or off?
4. If you were off, open the card’s page and read the upright or reversed section. Then write one line in a notebook in your own words.
5. Draw again. Ten cards a session is plenty.

Say you draw the Eight of Wands and say “something to do with travel?” The keywords come back as momentum, swift action, progress, communication, travel and breakthroughs. Travel is in there, but the bigger idea is speed: things that were stuck start moving. That gap between guess and meaning is where the learning happens.

Keep a tally of the cards you miss. After a week they usually cluster, and those are the cards to spend time on.

A 7-day plan

On the suit days below, read the suit’s page first, then set the pool to that suit and draw ten cards. Test yourself on each one before you read its meaning, then draw again until you’ve met all fourteen.

Day	What to draw and test
1	Major Arcana only, 10 cards. Focus on the cards numbered 0 to 10.
2	Major Arcana only, 10 cards. Focus on 11 to 21, then do a mixed round.
3	Wands: energy, drive and creative work. Wands only pool.
4	Cups: feelings and relationships. Cups only pool.
5	Swords: thoughts, conflict and truth. Swords only pool.
6	Pentacles: money, work, body and home. Pentacles only pool.
7	Court cards only, then a final round of 10 from the full deck with reversals on.

Seven days won’t make you fluent, but it will show you which cards you actually know. For the bigger picture of how to put cards together, how to read tarot cards is the next step.

Random Cards as Journaling Prompts

A card makes a good journaling prompt because it gives you a subject you didn’t choose. You can’t steer around the topic you’d rather avoid. Draw one card, read its short meaning, then write for ten minutes using the prompt for its type below.

If you draw	Write about
A Major Arcana card	What bigger theme is this card pointing to in my life at the moment?
An Ace	What is starting, or wants to start, and what would help it grow?
A Ten	What is coming to the end of a cycle, and what have I learned from it?
A Wands card	Where is my energy going, and what am I genuinely excited about?
A Cups card	What am I feeling that I haven’t said to anyone yet?
A Swords card	Which thought keeps looping, and how much of it is actually true?
A Pentacles card	What do my body, my money or my daily routine need from me this week?
A Page	What am I learning, and where could I be more curious?
A Knight	Where am I charging ahead, and where am I holding back?
A Queen or King	Where am I being asked to take care of something, or take charge of it?
Any reversed card	Where does this card’s energy feel blocked, delayed or turned inwards for me?

Some cards match more than one row. A Ten of Cups is both a Ten and a Cups card, so pick whichever prompt pulls at you, or write two short entries.

If you’d like a single card each morning with a set daily message, use the card of the day instead. It keeps one card for the whole day, which suits a daily habit. The generator has no such rule, so it’s better for evening pages, weekly reviews or any time you want a fresh prompt.

Practising Card Combinations

Knowing single cards is one skill. Reading two cards as one sentence is another, and it’s the one that makes readings feel alive. Set the generator to two cards from the full deck and practise like this:

1. Read the first card as the subject: what the situation is about.
2. Read the second card as what happens to it, or how it plays out.
3. Write the pair as one sentence of no more than 20 words.
4. Swap the order and write a second sentence. Notice how the story changes.

Say you draw the Three of Swords followed by The Star. The first is heartbreak and a painful truth; the second is hope, healing and calm after the storm. One sentence: “A real hurt, and the healing that follows it.” Swap them and the sentence darkens: hope first, then a painful truth arriving on top of it.

Now say the pair is the Eight of Wands and the Four of Swords. Speed meets rest. You might write: “Things are moving fast, and you’ll need a proper pause before the next push.” Pairs that pull against each other are the best practice.

Check your sentences against the tarot card combinations guide, which explains how to read two cards together and covers dozens of common pairs. Once two cards feel easy, move up to three and read them as a beginning, middle and end.

Prompts for Writing and Art

Tarot cards are built from characters, places and dilemmas, which makes them useful for anyone who writes or draws. Set the generator to three cards from the full deck, reversals on, and give each card a job:

Card	Its job in the story
First	Character: who they are, or the quality that drives them
Second	Setting: where the story happens, or the world they live in
Third	Conflict: what goes wrong, or what they want and can’t easily have

Imagine the draw is the Queen of Cups, the Ten of Pentacles and the Seven of Swords. The Queen gives you a compassionate, intuitive character who cares for everyone. The Ten of Pentacles gives you a family, an inheritance and long tradition. The Seven of Swords brings secrecy and someone not being honest. That’s a story: an empathetic woman in a wealthy family begins to sense that someone is hiding something about the inheritance. Her gift for reading people is what will uncover it.

A reversed card twists its role. A reversed Queen of Cups is over-giving and poorly boundaried, so now your heroine is so busy looking after everyone that she misses the secret for most of the book. Reversals are free plot complications.

For art, try one card and let its suit set the mood. The suits are traditionally linked to the four elements: Wands to fire, Cups to water, Swords to air and Pentacles to earth. Use the court cards only for a character study.

A Quick Question, and When to Use Something Else

Sometimes you just want one card for something on your mind, right now, without the one-per-day rule of the card of the day. The generator does that well. Ask an open question (“What do I need to know about this?”), draw one card, and read its meaning as a comment on the situation.

Say someone is wondering whether to sign up for an evening course and draws the Page of Pentacles. It’s the card of study, ambition and grounded beginnings, and its advice is to start small and keep going. That’s a clear nudge. Drawn reversed, the same Page warns about procrastination and plans that never quite start, which is a different conversation to have with yourself.

The generator is less useful when the question needs a particular shape of answer. Use another tool when:

• You want a yes or no. The yes or no tarot reading gives each card a clear yes, no or maybe, so you don’t have to judge it yourself.
• You want a story with a past, present and future. The three card spread gives each card a position, which makes it far easier to read than three unlabelled cards.
• The situation has lots of moving parts. The Celtic Cross uses ten cards in ten set positions.
• It’s about love. The love tarot reading asks questions made for relationships.

The difference is positions. A spread tells you what each card is answering. If you do draw several cards for a question here, decide what each one stands for before you press the button, not after. How you phrase the question matters too, and there’s a whole guide on asking the right questions in a tarot reading.

A Random Draw vs a Physical Shuffle

Is an online draw “as good as” real cards? As a matter of chance, the two are the same kind of thing. A well-shuffled deck puts the cards in an order nobody chose, and so does a random number generator. In fact, a casual hand shuffle is often less thoroughly mixed than a computer draw, because cards that started together tend to stay close unless you shuffle many times.

What differs is everything around the draw. With a physical deck you hold the cards, you shuffle while you think about your question, and you choose when to stop. That time spent is attention, and attention is what makes a reading useful. Many readers feel this ritual matters, and it’s a fair view.

You can bring some of that to a screen. Close other tabs. Take a breath and say the question in your head before you press the button. Press it once, and read what comes up before drawing again. The randomness is the same either way; the care you bring is up to you.

The Odds, Worked Out

A tarot deck has 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana, of which 16 are court cards. Here’s how likely some common results are with this generator, drawing without replacement and with reversals at 1 in 3.

Result	Chance
A particular card, drawing 1 card from the full deck	1 in 78 (1.3%)
A particular card, drawing 1 from the Major Arcana only	1 in 22 (4.5%)
A particular card, drawing 1 from the Minor Arcana only	1 in 56 (1.8%)
A particular card, drawing 1 from the court cards only	1 in 16 (6.25%)
A particular card somewhere in 10 cards from the full deck	10 in 78 (12.8%)
At least one Major in 3 cards from the full deck	63.6%
At least one Major in 5 cards from the full deck	81.9%
At least one Major in 10 cards from the full deck	97.2%
At least one court card in 5 cards from the full deck	69.3%
At least one reversal in 3 cards	19 in 27 (70.4%)
At least one reversal in 5 cards	211 in 243 (86.8%)
All 10 cards upright, with reversals on	1.7%

The working, for anyone who wants to check it:

• A particular card in 10 cards: each of the 78 cards is equally likely to be among the 10 drawn, so the chance is 10 ÷ 78.
• At least one Major: work out the chance of no Majors at all and take it from 1. For 3 cards, the chance that all three are Minors is 56/78 × 55/77 × 54/76 = 166,320 ÷ 456,456, about 36.4%, so at least one Major is about 63.6%. The same method gives 18.1% with no Majors in 5 cards and 2.8% in 10.
• At least one court card in 5: there are 62 cards that aren’t courts. The chance of five non-courts is 62/78 × 61/77 × 60/76 × 59/75 × 58/74, about 30.7%, so at least one court is about 69.3%.
• Reversals: each card is upright with a chance of 2 in 3, independently of the others. All three upright is (2/3)³ = 8/27, so at least one reversal is 19/27. For five cards, (2/3)⁵ = 32/243, so at least one reversal is 211/243. All ten upright is (2/3)¹⁰ = 1,024 ÷ 59,049, about 1.7%.

So Majors turn up a lot: nearly two in three three-card draws contain one, which means a Major doesn’t make a draw special on its own. And about a third of your cards will be reversed on average, so a few reversals are no cause for worry.

What a Random Draw Can’t Do

A random card is a prompt for reflection. It can’t tell you the future, and it can’t know facts about you or anyone else. Please don’t use it, or any tarot reading, to make decisions about your health, a pregnancy, a legal matter or money you can’t afford to lose. Those need a doctor, a lawyer or a qualified adviser.

The short meanings are also general. What a card means for you depends on what you already know about your situation.

And it can’t make a card mean more because it came up twice. Across separate draws, repeats happen by chance more often than people expect. If the same card keeps following you, the guide to pulling the same tarot card again and again covers both the maths and how to read it.

Last, redrawing until you get the answer you wanted turns a reading into a search for permission. For a real question, take the first draw seriously.

Random Tarot Card Generator: Frequently Asked Questions

More free readings: ask a direct question with the yes or no tarot reading, try the pick a card tarot reading, find your tarot birth cards, compare two birthdays with the tarot compatibility calculator, or take the quiz which tarot card are you?