Connecting Familiar to Claude

You’ll need two things:

• A Claude surface that supports custom connectors — Claude on the web, the desktop app, or your phone, as well as Claude Code.
• A Familiar account, which is free. You’ll sign in while adding the connector. The Classic Rider–Waite–Smith deck is free for everyone; other decks become yours once you buy them on familiartarot.com.

You don’t need a membership to connect. Your own Claude writes the reading; Familiar only serves the cards.

Familiar is a remote connector — there’s nothing to install and no key to paste. It lives at one address:

https://mcp.familiartarot.com/mcp

In Claude, open Settings → Connectors → Add custom connector, paste that address, and save.

Leave every advanced field blank. In particular, don’t enter an OAuth Client ID or Secret — Familiar registers your client automatically. A value typed into those fields is the single most common reason the connection fails, so if in doubt, clear them.

When Claude opens the connection, Familiar asks you to sign in — with a six-digit code sent to your email, or with Google. There’s no password to remember.

Signing in lets Claude see your Familiar library — your free and owned decks — so it can deal from the right one.

You never call these by name. You talk, and your Claude reaches for the tool that fits. There are eight:

• shuffle — mix the whole deck into a fresh deal, and open a session to draw from.
• cut — lift and set down a portion of the shuffled deck; a gesture of its own, distinct from a shuffle.
• draw — pull one to ten cards from the top, with no fixed positions.
• draw_spread — lay a named spread, each card in a fixed place: three (past / present / future), relationship, decision, the Celtic cross, and more.
• draw_situation — draw for an everyday moment: a card for the day, the week ahead, a yes-or-no, or an either-or between two options.
• list_decks — see the decks you can read with, free and owned.
• browse_deck — look up any card’s image and meaning without drawing it.
• list_patterns — see every spread and situation, with what each position means.

The connection won’t add, or it errors out. Almost always this is a value left in the advanced OAuth fields. Clear any Client ID or Secret so they’re blank — Familiar registers automatically — then add the connector again.

It describes cards without drawing them. The cards only come from the tools. Ask it plainly to shuffle and draw; if it narrates a card it didn’t draw, tell it to draw for real.

It says a deck isn’t yours. The Classic deck is free for everyone. Other decks become yours once you buy them on familiartarot.com — when you ask for one you don’t have yet, the tool hands you a link to it.

Do I need a membership? No. Connecting and reading over MCP is free on every plan. A membership and owned decks are for the Familiar web experience and for keeping more decks — separate from the connector.

Where does it work? Anywhere Claude supports custom connectors — the web, desktop, and phone, as well as Claude Code.

Readings you make through the connector are saved to your Familiar history and marked as coming from Claude, so you can return to them on the web. What we collect and how it’s handled is set out in the Privacy Policy, and the Terms of Service cover the rest.