A wheel, and who is on it
The Rider Waite version is busy: a wheel marked with letters, a sphinx above it, a snake descending on one side, a figure rising on the other, and four winged creatures reading books in the corners. The detail matters less than the shape. Something turns, and the position of everything on it changes without any of them having decided to move.
That is why this card resists the language of luck. A wheel has no opinion about who is at the top. The tradition takes from it a claim about circumstance and timing, not about deserving, and reading it as a promise of good fortune misses what the picture is doing. The figure rising now is on the same wheel as the one going down.
Upright and reversed
Upright, the reading is that the situation turns on something outside your control. Change, cycles and timing are the keywords. This is not a passive card, but it is a card that puts your own effort in proportion: the market, the hiring round, the season, the other person's decision. Any of these can be the wheel, and the useful response is to notice which one you are standing on.
Reversed the readings differ. The common one is resistance, someone bracing against a cycle instead of reading it and moving with it. The second is bad timing, the right action taken at the wrong point in the turn. A third, and the one worth taking seriously, is repetition: a cycle you have been round before and are entering again. What separates them is usually whether the querent recognises the shape of what is happening, and a reader who does not ask cannot know.
Tenth in the sequence
The Wheel is the tenth trump, sitting after the Hermit and before Justice in the ordering most decks use. That neighbourhood tells you how to read it. The Hermit withdraws to think in his own time. Justice weighs and assigns consequence. Between them, the Wheel is the card in which neither reflection nor merit is doing the work, because the movement is not personal.
Its element is fire and its planet Jupiter, following the Golden Dawn scheme that most modern decks inherited in the last century or so. Jupiter in that system is expansion and scope, the widening of a situation beyond the frame you were considering it in. It is not a guarantee of increase.
What it asks you
A tarot reading is a way of putting a question to yourself in an organised way, not a source of information about what happens next. The Wheel asks a specific and slightly deflating one. Which part of this are you actually deciding, and which part is going to move whatever you do.
People tend to answer that badly in both directions. Some take responsibility for weather. Others treat a decision as weather because that is easier. Sorting the two takes an afternoon and no cards at all, but the card is a decent reason to sit down and do it. It offers no view on how the turn will come out, and anyone reading it that way has added something that is not in the tradition.
Questions people ask about this
Is the Wheel of Fortune a good card to draw?
It is neither. The tradition reads it as movement in circumstance rather than as a verdict, and a wheel by definition carries things both up and down. Treating it as a promise of a good outcome is a misreading of the image.
What does the Wheel of Fortune mean upright?
That the situation turns on something outside your control, with timing and cycles as the surrounding ideas. It usually points at a factor the querent has been treating as if it were theirs to decide.
What does it mean reversed?
Three readings are in circulation: fighting a cycle rather than reading it, acting at the wrong point in the turn, and going round something you have been round before. Which one applies depends on the spread and on what the querent recognises.
Which planet is the Wheel of Fortune?
Jupiter, with fire as its element, in the Golden Dawn correspondences that most modern decks use. Jupiter there means scope and expansion, the situation turning out to be larger than the frame you had it in.
Does the Wheel predict a change of luck?
No, and this site makes no predictive claims. What the card gives you is a prompt about which parts of a situation are yours to move, which is a question you can answer without it.
How does it relate to Justice?
Justice follows it in the trump order and works on the opposite principle, weighing what was done and assigning consequence. The pair is often read as circumstance and accountability standing side by side.