If you want to extract a folder, but you want to exclude one or several folders during the extraction, you can use the --exclude
option.
tar -cf archive.tar ./my-folder/ --exclude="my-folder/sub1" --exclude="my-folder/sub3"
With this folder tree :
my-folder/
sub1/
sub2/
sub3/
The result will be :
./archive.tar
my-folder/
sub2/