In my opinion, if you can read with a deck, then that is a good deck for you. I personally dislike some of the modern decks (e.g. the "Penny Dreadful Deck") with little or no form of symbols (colour, pictorial or setting) on them as I see no depth to any reading that can be obtained from them, you rely on the card definition alone with a little intuition. Reading is complex to understand in depth, there are a lot of subconscious keys when you get into the depths of the process. Things like the impact of a given symbol over the card as a whole or how two cards affect one another in a reading. I'm writing a second book to discuss this sort of thing and add depth to my introductory work.
Nice post there very much about the Death (XIII) card in the Major Arcana.
Note: I count numerology in with the definition.
RE: Tarot Basics - The Major Arcana Part 1