Black Requiem | Counterspell (2022)

Black Requiem emerged to counter-spell the negative energies of its predecessor while preserving the original artwork’s essence.

Requiem recounts tales of lost love, while Black Requiem employs Magick sigils to counter the negativity. On cards portraying the adverse emotions (aces and court cards), a glyph is imprinted, entrapping the negativity eternally.

Magick sigils focus willpower, devoid of black magic or satanic influences. This technique, rather straightforward in its application, imparts a touch of enchantment to the entire project.

I fashioned 16 Magick sigils for each court card and ace. It involves crafting a present-tense statement and extracting a glyph from its constituent letters. This glyph operates as a sigil. In Black Requiem, court cards and aces retain the original imagery, but bear a gold or silver sigil, partially concealing the illustration. This sigil negates negative feelings by signifying their opposite.

In the instance of the Ace of Spades, solitude (solitudo in Latin) is depicted, countered by companionship (comitas in Latin).

The Magick Sigil is derived by discarding vowels and repeated consonants. Consequently, the sigil employs the letters C-M-T-S (from Comitas).

These letters form parts of the sigil, allowing crossing, rotation, mirroring, or duplication.

Once created, the sigil merits daily observation to reinforce its meaning. These basics constitute my approach; undoubtedly, more exists concerning the history of Magick Sigils. Nonetheless, I adopted the technique for crafting sigils and instilling significance into the overall concept.

In the deck all court cards and aces bear a magick sigil with cold foil application at their centers (gold for hearts and diamonds, silver for clubs and spades). Number cards display healed pips  now gleaming in gold and silver with cold foil application; unlike the initial Requiem Playing Cards version.

Both the tuckbox and back design underwent a significant restyling.

An limited variant was designed and produced exclusively for patrons in 2022. Designing this tuckbox presented a challenge for the printer due to the small cutouts on both sides, which reveal the deck’s gilded edges. 550 tuckboxes were delivered flat, glued only on one side, necessitating manual pre-folding for each to avert risks at Cartamundi’s assembly line.

A metal card enhances the deck, granting it weight and substance. The male joker was 3D modeled in bass-relief, adorning a card-sized metal plate as the tuckbox face, with white enamel accents the Black Requiem text atop it. Black Requiem wasn’t crowdfunded; the limited variant was crafted exclusively for Stockholm17  patrons. The standard variant, without the metal card, was released on the Stockholm17 web-store for public access.

Furthermore, the uncut tuckbox sheet was printed to complement a special black acrylic frame for display. Even this frame (310 units crafted) was designed as an exclusive perk for the 2022 patrons.