10 instances, 7 groups
The ten suits provide Tau's most familiar card identity: color, family, and classic deck feel.
Suits keep Tau close to ordinary cards.
The deck has ten suits in five color pairs, with the black and red suits preserving the traditional club, spade, heart, and diamond anchors. They are the most recognizable way to group cards, either by 10 glyphs or 5 colors.
They appear in the traditional opposite card corners.
Use the traditional suits for familiar card games, suit colors for matching, or color pairs as teams, factions, or families.
For new designs, the soft/hard suit pairs can express polarity, while the five color families can support collection and scoring.
Suits are the most familiar layer. They work with ranks for classic card identity, and with partitions for balanced subsets. They give each card its primary coloring, and provide a loose domain for the words.
