The four suits, and what each one is about
Fifty-six of the seventy-eight cards are minor arcana, split across four suits. Learn what the suits are about and you can read most of the deck before you have memorised a single card.
Wands: fire
Drive, work in the sense of vocation, momentum, what you are building. Wands cards are about energy and direction rather than money or feeling. A spread full of Wands is a question about whether to push.
Cups: water
Feeling, love, what you are carrying and who with. Cups are the emotional register of the deck. If someone asks a practical question and draws three Cups, the question was not practical.
Swords: air
Thought, truth, conflict, and the things you turn over at three in the morning. The hardest suit to draw and the most useful to read honestly: a lot of what looks like disaster in the Swords is anxiety being described accurately.
Pentacles: earth
Money, the body, the house, the job that pays. The least glamorous suit and the one that most often has something you can act on today.
Reading by suit alone
Before you look up a single card, count the suits. Two Swords and a Cup is a question you are thinking about too hard and feeling about too little. Four Pentacles and nothing else is a situation with no emotional content being acknowledged. This takes ten seconds and is often the most accurate sentence in the reading.