Seems no bad idea ever dies!
They're just little cards with ways to help you consider/approach a problem from another angle. I've never sprung for a set myself as they're a bit pricey and I've got enough physical clutter as it is. But, many find them useful to some degree. Certainly, I think, we would all agree that often we need to consider a problem from a different angle?
What aspect of the Oblique Strategies cards do you consider a "bad idea?"
Say I'm unhappy with my work life and I don't feel like I'm getting anywhere with the plans I have set out. I'm starting to think that I need to just stop fighting reality and switch to a career I'm very qualified for with guaranteed employment and excellent pay. Unfortunately that career is one that I'm very sure I won't enjoy. It will be a great source of income, but also a lot of stress.
I pull a card that is associated with the long slog that it takes to achieve your goals. It's basically just an encouraging little passage that says that the path is hard, but hard work is how you get where you want to be.
Looking at it rationally, it's so generic that you could make it apply to basically any situation. Shoot, I could even interpret it in a way that the hard work of the surefire job that I know I won't be happy at will eventually lead me to where I want to be.
Instead, I use my knowledge of myself and my current situation and take it as a reminder that what I'm doing will eventually pay off. It helps me view the crappy spot that I'm in as an integral part of getting to where I need to be.
It's a tool and a framework. It gives you another lens to view the situation through, which I've found to be incredibly helpful.
These cards just seem like a simpler version of that.
There's so many different iterations and styles of Tarot developed by so many people over the last century, couple centuries, or millenia depending on what history you assign to them. It's hard to tell what the intentions were of the groups that originally popularized them. Rider-Waite was obviously the start of what I'd consider our modern Tarot ideas, but everything to do with Tarot has been piled over with so much esoterism and mysticism and general shrouding of the actual history that I don't even care to try to separate fact from narrative. They're useful to me and my deck is pretty and that's about as far as I care to go.