A seven-card horseshoe for weighing two options
intermediate7
A curved layout with three cards for each option and one for what you want regardless, useful for a genuine either-or.
Seven cards in an arc, read from the left end to the right. The left three describe the first option, the right three describe the second, and the card at the top of the curve, position four, is what you want that is true of either path. The layout is for a real either-or, two jobs, two cities, stay or go, and it is wasted on a question with five possibilities.
Within each set of three, fix the positions before you draw: what this option gives you, what it costs, and what it asks of you a year in. The third of those is the one that makes this spread better than laying two cards side by side, because most difficult choices look fine at the point of decision and differ in what they demand later.
Position four, at the apex, is the card to read first even though it lands fourth. It names the thing you are after underneath the choice, and it often makes one of the two three-card sets suddenly legible. A Nine of Cups at the apex, a satisfied figure with nine cups lined up behind him, says the aim is contentment rather than achievement, and the option whose "what it asks of you" card shows relentless effort starts to look different.
Compare the sets by position, not as wholes. Put the two "what it costs" cards next to each other and read them as a pair. Then the two "asks of you" cards. This is more informative than trying to hold six cards in mind at once, and it stops the more dramatic-looking set from winning on visual weight alone. A Three of Swords in a cost position is vivid, and a Four of Pentacles in the other cost position may well describe something worse.
The spread does not choose. Nothing in it is an instruction, and if you find yourself hoping the cards will pick, that hope is worth noting in the journal as its own piece of information. What the horseshoe does well is make the costs comparable, which is the part people skip when a decision has been unresolved for months.
Where the two options involve money, a contract, or medical treatment, keep the reading to your own priorities and take the substance elsewhere. A seven-card spread can tell you what you are hoping for from a move. It cannot tell you whether the numbers work, and it should not be asked to.