Look, I used to be one of those guys who told everyone you needed to light seven candles, use the velvet cloth, and meditate for an hour before touching the deck. What a load of crap that was. When you’re dealing with real life, who has the time? If you’re running a serious side hustle, you can’t afford to spend 45 minutes meditating over whether Sarah should switch jobs. I needed answers, and I needed them fast. I started asking myself: what is the absolute bare minimum you need to yank a reliable, hard answer out of the cards right now?
I spent years following the rules. I bought all the books. I learned the history. I learned the spreads. The Celtic Cross, the Horseshoe, the seven-card weekly spread. All junk, if you ask me now. It takes forever, and half the time, the client gets confused by the complexity and misses the point entirely. I was convinced that if I didn’t follow the proper ritual, the reading would be garbage. But necessity, man, that’s the real teacher. It forced me to abandon all the rules.
How I Ditched the Fancy Crap
Why did I figure this out? Why do I know these instant tricks work? Because about a year and a half ago, everything just imploded. I had this great little side hustle doing detailed cartomancy reads online. I was getting pretty popular, handling maybe 10 or 15 a week, standard stuff, taking my sweet time, charging a premium for the depth. Then my old man had a catastrophic accident. Totally unexpected. He needed immediate, round-the-clock care, and it was down to me. I had to drop everything, move out of my place, and move into his house to manage the situation.
I was gone for three days, dealing with hospitals and paperwork, without even checking my phone. When I finally logged back into my reading platform, I had 62 paid reading requests stacked up. Sixty-two! All expecting feedback within 24 hours because my auto-responder promised quick turnaround. I couldn’t refund them; I needed the cash badly for the medical bills. I was staring at disaster. I was panicking so bad I thought I was going to lose my mind. I had maybe four hours of quiet time that evening before the next set of caregivers arrived, and I had to deliver almost 62 readings.
No way was I going to pull off a 5-card spread times sixty-two. That’s 310 cards to interpret in 240 minutes. You can’t even pick up the deck that many times. My elaborate, meaningful ritual had become an impossibility. I had to radically simplify.
I grabbed the deck—my biggest, clunkiest, 78-card Rider-Waite clone—and I just dumped it onto the kitchen table. No shuffling, no centering, nothing. I just focused on the client’s name and question, muttered it out loud, and reached my hand in. I needed to deliver the readings, and I needed to live my life. The stress forced the system.
The Fast-Track Cartomancy Cheat Sheet
I delivered those 62 readings in roughly three hours flat. And here’s the thing: I didn’t get a single complaint. In fact, people loved the brevity. Since then, I’ve permanently adopted this chaotic, fast method. It’s not about channeling; it’s about getting the immediate, powerful vibration of the query and slapping the right piece of cardboard down.
If you want instant answers, forget everything you read in the books. These are the tricks I use when time is the enemy:
- No More Than Three Cards: Anything more than three is fluff. You are not writing a novel, you are delivering a punch. If the client asks about a relationship, you pull one card for Their Energy, one card for Your Energy, and one card for the Potential Outcome. Done. If you feel compelled to pull a fourth, ignore that impulse. It’s your anxiety talking, not the universe.
- The One-Card Blitz for Yes/No: This is powerful and crude. For any yes/no or simple situational query, you pull exactly one card. That card is your answer. Don’t look at the suits. You only look at the number. If the number is Odd (1, 3, 5, 7, 9, plus Major Arcana 1, 3, 5, etc.), the answer is YES. Action required. If the number is Even (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, plus Major Arcana 2, 4, 6, etc.), the answer is NO. Wait and see. If it’s a court card (Page, Knight, Queen, King), the card means Maybe, and the situation depends on someone else’s unpredictable decision. It’s a literal coin flip based on numerology, and it’s always right enough.
- Ditch the Shuffling Ceremony: Forget the fifteen minutes of meditative shuffling. Hold the deck, think of the client’s name, and cut the deck into two piles. Pick the pile you feel most disgusted by. That is where the immediate energy of the problem sits. You are looking for friction, not peace.
- Keywords Only: Never elaborate. I mean it. If you get the 8 of Swords, you type “Feeling trapped. Self-imposed fear.” Done. If you get The Tower, you type “Immediate, massive necessary change. Expect chaos.” You are a telegram service, not a therapy session. The client’s mind will fill in the rest of the meaning immediately because they are desperate for the answer, and their brain wants the shortest path to confirmation.
That incident, the sheer panic of having to manage a crisis and deliver 62 readings, taught me more than ten years of studying occult literature. I learned that all the flowery language and ritual preparation are just comfort blankets for the reader. The actual powerful information is blunt, immediate, and quick. If you’re struggling to keep up with life and still want to practice, ditch the junk and embrace the instant pull. It works.
