u/marsman_ie

I’m a Mexican illustrator, and for the past two years I’ve been building a deck around Mesoamerican cosmology and the Tonalpohualli, the 260-day ritual and divinatory calendar.

What interests me most isn’t just the imagery, but the act of translation.

The Tonalpohualli works through 20 day signs interacting with 13 numbers, alongside trecenas, deities, directions and different layers of influence.

I started asking what would happen if part of that structure were transplanted into a completely different technology: a modern deck of cards.

Each 13-card suit maps one of the first four trecenas, the four suits correspond to cosmic directions and natural forces, the courts carry deities, and the numbered cards preserve the sequence of the first 52 days of the cycle.

I’m not claiming this is an ancient Mesoamerican card practice — it obviously isn’t. It’s a new construction built from an older symbolic system from my own cultural heritage.

And that’s the part I find fascinating:

If you preserve the relationships inside a symbolic system but change the medium that carries them, how much of the original system survives?

At what point does translation become the creation of a new magical/divinatory technology?

I’d genuinely be curious how people here think about that.

The project is called El Quinto Sol: The Mesoamerican Cosmos, and if you want to see what the system looks like in practice, it’s here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards/description

A few days ago I shared some of the artwork from El Quinto Sol, a playing-card project I’ve been building around Mesoamerican cosmology, and the response here was incredibly kind.

This is the darker side of the project: my interpretation of Mictlantecuhtli, the Mexica deity associated with Mictlan, the realm of the dead.

I wanted this version to feel less like simply putting an ancient figure onto a card and more like entering a different layer of the same cosmological world, black backgrounds, gold, fire-like orange, turquoise and saturated accents, while keeping references to the visual language I encountered throughout the research.

Everything is illustrated by me! drawing, watercolor and digital preparation, no generative AI.

The project is now officially live on Kickstarter for anyone who asked to see the finished campaign:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards

I’d love to know what you think of this darker interpretation compared with the original deck.

Hi everyone! Some of you may remember the Mesoamerican-inspired playing cards I shared here while developing El Quinto Sol. I wanted to return with some of the latest artwork and thank you for the conversations and feedback along the way.

I’m an illustrator from Mexico, and this project grew out of wanting to better understand the stories and imagery I grew up surrounded by. Studying codices, sculpture and historical research became a way of exploring that inheritance through drawing.

The deck draws particularly on Nahua and Mexica mythology, alongside visual references from different Mesoamerican codex traditions. It’s a contemporary artistic interpretation, and the accompanying digital guide explains the sources and how I’ve adapted them into the cards.

Since my earlier posts, I’ve developed two additional editions: Alebrije, drawing on Mexican folk art as a distinct, modern influence; and Mictlantecuhtli, a darker interpretation honoring the Lord of the Underworld.

I’ve included images of the latest designs below. These are development previews, with production finishes still to come.

The project launched on Kickstarter today, which is both exciting and a little terrifying—it’s my first campaign!

If you’d like to explore the project or help bring it into print, here’s the link:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards

Support and sharing are deeply appreciated, and I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the artwork and its references. Thank you for being part of the process.

Juan / The Mythographer

Hi everyone! I’m an illustrator based in Mexico, and I wanted to share a project I’ve been working on: El Quinto Sol, a deck of playing cards inspired by Mexica mythology and the wider Mesoamerican cosmos.

The mythology runs through the whole deck: the deities, the four directions, the colors, and the symbols on the numbered cards. I designed everything, including the lettering and suit symbols, around those connections.

The illustrations are my own interpretations, drawing on codices and historical imagery. There’s also a digital companion, the Codex of the Fifth Sun, explaining the references and my design choices.

I’ve included a few close-ups here. I’d love to hear what you think of how the imagery translates into playing cards, and I’m happy to talk through the references behind any of the illustrations!

Hi! My name is Juan, Im an illustrator and designer based in Mexito City. For a little more than a year I've been working on a personal project, El Quinto Sol, a playing card deck inspired by mostly Nahua and Mexica mythology.

I've always been enamored by mythology and I wanted to explore how to share it through illustration and contemporary design.

One of the main challenges was to balance the detail of the artwork with the practical requirements of a standard French suited playin card deck. Every element is original and made by hand, the title typography for example has already gone through redesign after feedback from card collectors.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on how it all came together!

Hi everyone! I’m Juan, an illustrator and designer from Mexico City.

For almost two years I’ve been working on El Quinto Sol, a fully custom playing-card deck inspired by Mesoamerican mythology and cosmology.

I wanted to keep the structure of a traditional French-suited deck completely intact, while building another symbolic system underneath it:

Spades - North - Wind
Hearts - East - Fire
Diamonds - South - Water
Clubs - West - Earth

The court cards represent deities, the Aces represent foundational forces, and the numbered cards incorporate glyphs, Mesoamerican numerals and calendrical references.

Every card is original artwork, and the deck is still meant to function normally for poker, blackjack, solitaire, cardistry, or whatever you already play. Everything is handmade, no AI.

I’m launching the first production on Kickstarter on September 29 if anyone wants to follow it:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards

Would love to hear what you guys think.

Hi everyone,

I’m Juan, an illustrator/designer from Mexico City, and for the past couple of years I’ve been working on a somewhat strange card-game experiment.

I wanted to make a deck that could still function as a completely normal French0-suited playing card deck: poker, blackjack, rummy, whatever you normally play — while also having its own visual world and a game designed specifically around it. The result is El Quinto Sol: The Mesoamerican Cosmos.

It’s a standard 52-card deck + 2 Jokers, but every card is custom illustrated and the four suits are built around four cosmic directions:

Spades - North - Wind
Hearts - East - Fire
Diamonds - South - Water
Clubs - West - Earth

The court cards represent deities, the Aces represent foundational forces, and the numbered cards incorporate Mesoamerican numerals, glyphs, and calendrical references. But I didn’t want the deck to be something people only looked at, so I started designing a game around the existing structure of the cards...

The thing I’m trying to preserve is the pleasure of recognizing patterns in a normal deck. I don’t want players constantly reading paragraphs of card text or learning 50 unique abilities, the information is already there in rank, suit and sequence, so the game tries to build on that.

It also means that once you understand the rules, you could theoretically play the game with any ordinary deck of cards. The illustrated deck gives those mechanics their thematic meaning, but it isn’t mechanically dependent on special printed instructions.

I’m also curious whether people generally like games that repurpose the familiar 52-card structure like this, or whether you prefer games built around entirely bespoke decks.

The artwork and physical deck are now heading toward production, and I’m launching the project through Kickstarter on September 29 if anyone wants to see the full deck:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards

Happy to explain any of the rules or design decisions if anyone’s curious.

Hi everyone! I’m an illustrator/designer from Mexico City. I’ve been developing El Quinto Sol, a fully illustrated French-suited playing card deck inspired by Mesoamerican mythology, cosmology and pictographic language, with a particularly strong Nahua/Mexica backbone.

I’ve always been fascinated by objects that work on more than one level, something can be beautiful, functional, and at the same time carry an entire symbolic system underneath it. That became the central idea behind this deck.

The four suits correspond to the four cosmic directions and their elemental forces. The court cards reinterpret deities and mythic figures, while the numbered cards incorporate references to the Tonalpohualli, the 260-day sacred count, including day signs, trecenas, numerals and associated regent gods.

So each card is meant to work simultaneously as a normal playing card and as one fragment of a larger cosmological map. I’m also creating a companion Codex of the Fifth Sun, visually inspired by Mesoamerican pictorial manuscripts such as the Codex Borgia and Boturini Codex. Its purpose is to unpack the symbolism in the cards, not simply give each one a fixed “meaning,” but explain how the gods, directions, numbers, glyphs, colors and calendrical references relate to one another.

The project is a contemporary interpretation, not a claim to reconstruct an ancient cartomantic or occult system. What interests me is what happens when these historical symbolic structures are translated into a new object and allowed to develop a life of their own.

I’m currently preparing the first production through crowdfunding. If anyone wants to see more of the project or follow it before launch:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/themythographer/el-quinto-sol-the-mesoamerican-cosmos-playing-cards