The Trick of the Deck

A game about choice, chance, and the art of playing well.

By Haven Duddy

A Living Lattice Field Note

Introduction

Imagine that when you’re born, you’re handed a deck of cards.

It’s the same deck everyone gets, but the hands we draw look different.

Some seem lucky, some don’t.

That’s how the game of life can feel—unfair, uneven, unpredictable.

But underneath all the pictures and numbers, the cards are made of the same paper and ink.

In truth, we each hold the same opportunity:

to decide what our cards mean,

to choose how to play them,

and to believe that we can shape the game we’re in.

That’s the trick of the deck.

It looks fixed, but it never was.

The History Hidden in the Deck

Playing cards began as a map of life itself.

The earliest decks—the old tarot—used cups, coins, swords, and staffs to tell the story of emotion, creation, work, and transformation.

When those became the modern suits—hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades—the meaning didn’t vanish; it simply hid inside the games we play.

The four suits still echo the four states of matter that build our world:

• Hearts / Water / Liquid – emotion, connection, love.

• Diamonds / Fire / Plasma – creation, energy, transformation.

• Clubs / Earth / Solid – work, stability, grounding.

• Spades / Air / Gas – intellect, challenge, renewal.

Together they form the cycle of life—the same pattern repeating everywhere from physics to feeling.

The Trick

A deck of cards is nothing until you give it meaning.

Lay down a card, call it an ace, and the world agrees that it’s an ace.

Call it something else, and the meaning changes.

That’s how life works too.

Each moment is like placing a card on the table and saying, “This is what this means.”

When everyone agrees, the game feels real.

But if someone suddenly says, “Wait, that’s not what that card means,” confusion appears and the whole game shifts.

Reality is as real as we say it is—but it can change at any moment with a new thought, a new rule, a new card, or a well-played Joker.

The Joker’s Lesson

The Joker is the reminder that no game is final.

It doesn’t belong to any suit; it can represent anything or nothing.

It’s the card that bends the rules just enough to show that the rules were never absolute.

It’s the doorway to possibility—the permission slip for imagination.

The Treat

And maybe that’s the real trick of it all.

Life, like a deck of cards, is both real and pretend.

It’s as real as a poker game—serious, thrilling, full of consequence—yet it’s still a game played with bits of paper.

It’s real because we agree that it’s real.

The same cards can become war or laughter, fortune or friendship, or a round of Go Fish with kindergartners.

It’s all the same deck, just rearranged, renamed, re-imagined.

Once you understand that, you realize you have more freedom than you ever thought:

you can create a new game, invent new rules, or play with the old ones differently.

And the best games?

They’re played together—by people who choose to sit at the same table and agree on rules that are fair and kind.

Where everyone has a chance, and the goal isn’t just to win but to play well, to stay honest, to enjoy the company.

That’s the moment when the game becomes love:

when two or more people look at the same cards and say, “Yes, we agree. Let’s play.”