Module 6- Part 5: Adapt, Improvise, Overcome
Benji
Adapt, Improvise, Overcome…
Here’s one more way you can have fun thinking ‘unconventionally’ with the memorized deck.
That said, even once we’ve gone through this, don’t let me tell you that we’ve exhausted all of the ways to think unconventionally with the memorized deck.
After all, the whole point of thinking unconventionally is to not let yourself be limited by other people’s definitions…
But for now, we’ll close this section with another ‘quickfire’ round of ideas on adapting existing classics to the memorized deck.
As I name these, I’m not going to give the method for each individual one—I’ll leave it to you to have fun discovering them.
Again, don’t let my ideas be the extent of it though. Don’t be afraid to think unconventionally with these classic routines. The more creative you can get in this ‘idea phase’, the better. Start wild—we can always rein ourselves in, but it’s harder to go the other way.
And later, we can ‘trim’ them and make sure they follow broader convention, like we just discussed.
Here they are…
Classics:
- Ambitious Card
We could perform a very clean first phase of the Ambitious Card by letting the spectator just NAME a card. We then estimation cut it to the top and make it ‘jump’ to the top. We then proceed into the rest of the routine as usual. By the end, depending on your method, the stack should still be intact (with maybe one card to be replaced—the chosen card.)
We could perform the Ambitious Card and then follow up with Ambitious Quartets, as seen in Module 5.
I also tip my personal favorite phase for the Ambitious Card in the Live Session.
- Triumph
As we’ve seen, we can work this into our ‘Sliced Bread’ faro wheel. So we can perform regular memorized deck effects in Mnemonica, then shuffle your way into Sliced Bread (I showed you how to do this at the time, in Module 4) and perform Triumph, ending in New Deck Order.
It’s a stunning idea.
Alternatively, I’ve seen it mentioned that if you use Vernon’s Triumph using a mem deck, you can use a named card rather than a physically selected card.
- Out Of This World (OOTW)
Like above, the usual setup for OOTW is a part of the ‘Sliced Bread’ faro wheel. So we can perform regular mem deck pieces and then shuffle our way into the OOTW setup and perform it as a closer (since it destroys the stack, it’s best as a closer—otherwise a deck switch is called for.)
- Dr Daley’s Last Trick
The regular version of this is so strong, I’m not sure we need to do much to it.
That said, here’s one idea:
Using a second deck, let someone freely chose a card and show it to everyone (you included.) Now force the card that is two cards below it in the stack on someone else. If they picked the QH, you force the QC (11 and 13).
Then estimation cut the mem deck so that the first selected card is on top.
You’re actually now set up to perform Dr. Daley’s Last Trick using the two selected cards, but showing them as two indifferent cards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDL_ySPQGA
Of course, you’ll need a dramatic reason to go from having them pick a card to doing Dr Daley’s Last Trick—perhaps you’ve already done an effect with the selected cards and this is presented as just ‘another’ effect…with that kicker ending.
- Card to Wallet
We can make this even stronger than the usual effect by using a freely named card that we estimation cut to the top, rather than a physical selection that we control.
- Torn and Restored Card
Based on Woody Aragon’s ‘Siamese stack’, I came up with the following idea:
The deck is stacked so that the second 26 cards are the mates of the first 26. It’s like a stay stack, but rather than mirroring the first half, it just repeats.
(I later learned that Patrick Redford had a similar idea and coined it the ‘Parallel Stack’)
We could have someone select a card from one half, glimpse to learn the identity, and estimation cut the mate of that card to the top.
We could then perform a Torn and Restored routine by switching their selected card with the new top card and only flashing segments of the card as we tear it (this idea was inspired by ideas from Dani DaOrtiz.)
Since we’re using a mate, it looks like we’re tearing up their card when we only flash small segments when in motion. We could then turn the deck face up, mercury fold the new bottom card, and switch that in as we do in most T&R routines.
- ACAAN
All the best versions of this use a memorized deck. We discussed all the details on this in Module 5.
- Color Changing Deck
Funnily enough, we just discussed that earlier this module, using both a Rubik’s cube and a variation on Hugard’s ‘And The Spectator Blew’ from Greater Magic.
- Oil and Water
See our 16 card version in Module 4.
- Ace Assembly/Ace Production
Ace Assemblies become pretty simple once we know our way around the Quartets principle. We can simply estimation cut each card to the top, false shuffle and false cut, then produce the card from the top of the deck (Benzais Spin Out, Lennart Green’s Top Shot, any way of producing a card off the top will work—even just straight up taking it off the top!)
The beauty of this is that we have all the time in the world to do our estimation cuts—after all, the whole thing is meant to be a demonstration of skill, so they just seem a natural part of the routine.
But at the end of it all, you look much more technically skilled than you really are.
- The Chicago Opener
We actually just explored a sponge ball version of this earlier this Module.
- Sam the Bellhop
The basic idea behind this kind of routine is that you tell a story, and each card you turn over links to the story (for example, you might start by saying “5 years ago…” and show a 5, “…to this day” and show a 2 for the ‘to’.)
Since we’re using a memorized deck, we can build our own story beforehand, then go back and forth between false shuffling and dealing cards.
Woody Aragon had the great idea to do this slightly differently by making up the story as you go along—because you always know which card is coming next, that’s not as hard as it sounds.
- Cutting to the Aces
Since you’ve spent so long working on your estimation cuts, you’re probably closer to this than you think.
The other benefit is that you can do this for ANY Four of a Kind.
Again, you’ll need to be working with the mem deck for a while before you attempt anything like this. And if I were to try it, I’d do it in an informal setting where it’s not going to matter much if it takes me a couple of tries.
- Invisible Deck
Since we know the position of each card in the deck, we could easily estimation cut a card to the top, use the Braue reversal to reverse it, and cut it back to the center. I’ve seen multiple people play with ideas like these, and Aaron Fisher has a good version of it in CC.
- The Rising Card
Again, we can do this with a named card. Just estimation cut it to the top or bottom and do one of the many impromptu versions—such as the classic one using your pinky finger.
- Searching Cards
Mike Close has some good work on this. Again, the main benefit is that we can do it using a freely named card—just control it to the top and proceed as per your favorite method.
- Open Prediction
The memorized deck, again, is perfect for this. We can have a double backer on the table, let the spectator name a card, and estimation cut that card to the top. We then turn over the tabled card using the top card of the deck (“so I don’t even touch it”) using a variation on the Mexican Turnover to ‘show’ that the card on the table is the named card.
- Princess Card Trick
We can perform a neat variation on this effect using the memorized deck and a Chan Canasta subtlety.
We let the spectator cut the deck anywhere and remove the top 5 cards (or spread the deck and make sure they take 5 consecutive cards from anywhere in the spread.)
We glimpse the key card, which tells us the identity of the cards.
We have the spectator fan the cards in front of them and we tell them to think of ONE of the cards.
Here’s the Chan Canasta subtlety:
Tell them “Think of a card. You have one? Good. Now put it behind your back—no, the whole thing.”
What happens here is that when we ask them to ‘put it behind their back’ they start to remove the card they’re thinking of. The minute we see them begin to pull that card out, we can stop them and say “no, the whole thing.”
Because the cards are in memorized order, we know exactly which card they’re thinking of. If they went to remove the second card, we know it’s the second card in our memorized order. If they went to remove the fourth card, we know it’s the fourth card in our memorized order.
Now, once they have all the cards behind their back, we tell them to shuffle the packet and bring it out when they’re satisfied.
(when you think about it, this doesn’t make sense. If they’re just THINKING of a card, it doesn’t matter whether they’re shuffled or not—we should have no idea. But since shuffling is such an accepted and standard notion, it feels natural.)
Now we take the cards, look at them, and place one of them in our pocket. Of course, since we know the identity of their card, this is easy to do.
We ask them to name their card. Once they do, we reveal that it isn’t in our hand—and it is in fact the card we placed in our pocket.
NOTE: Asi Wind also uses this subtlety to great effect in his effect, ‘Crossing Over.’
- Lie Detector
Most versions of this involve the magician forcing a card on their spectator and then revealing it by turning into a human ‘lie detector.’
However, with the memorized deck, they can freely select a card—and once we glimpse, we know it.
- Spelling Tricks
We’ve done a LOT of spelling over this course (and there’s more to come) so I won’t dwell on this too long.
I will say that, with most of the memorized stacks, there’s a group of 5 or so cards that can be spelled to without disturbing the stack order.
That’s because there isn’t as much variety as it seems in spelling cards.
‘Of’ is always going to be 2 letters.
‘Spades’ is always going to be 6.
‘Hearts’ is always going to be 6 (same as Spades.)
‘Clubs’ is always going to be 5.
‘Diamonds’ is always going to be 8.
The only variety is in the value of the card—and even then, it’s mostly going to be similar lengths.
- Triple Coincidence
We looked at a verison of this in Module 4.
- Card Through Window
We could combine this with some of our ‘duo revelations’ ideas. They freely select a card, we glimpse to get the identity, and then reveal the identity to a hidden accomplice via the secret number identity.
(Perhaps we do this as a two phase thing. In the first phase we get a friend to name the card over the phone using the first idea—our hidden accomplice comes in handy for this too—and then the second phase is the card through window. Of course, we’d need to come up with a presentation that works for this.)
The accomplice then loads the card on the window, and the rest is down to us.
So, there’s a few ideas to get the ‘ol gears whirring.
Of course, the list could go on.
But I’ll leave that to you.
After all, that’s half the fun.
Well, that’s a wrap on Module 6.
Let’s hit the FINAL module, where you’ll discover the secret behind my greatest creation…
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Adapt, Improvise, Overcome…
Here’s one more way you can have fun thinking ‘unconventionally’ with the memorized deck.
That said, even once we’ve gone through this, don’t let me tell you that we’ve exhausted all of the ways to think unconventionally with the memorized deck.
After all, the whole point of thinking unconventionally is to not let yourself be limited by other people’s definitions…
But for now, we’ll close this section with another ‘quickfire’ round of ideas on adapting existing classics to the memorized deck.
As I name these, I’m not going to give the method for each individual one—I’ll leave it to you to have fun discovering them.
Again, don’t let my ideas be the extent of it though. Don’t be afraid to think unconventionally with these classic routines. The more creative you can get in this ‘idea phase’, the better. Start wild—we can always rein ourselves in, but it’s harder to go the other way.
And later, we can ‘trim’ them and make sure they follow broader convention, like we just discussed.
Here they are…
Classics:
- Ambitious Card
We could perform a very clean first phase of the Ambitious Card by letting the spectator just NAME a card. We then estimation cut it to the top and make it ‘jump’ to the top. We then proceed into the rest of the routine as usual. By the end, depending on your method, the stack should still be intact (with maybe one card to be replaced—the chosen card.)
We could perform the Ambitious Card and then follow up with Ambitious Quartets, as seen in Module 5.
I also tip my personal favorite phase for the Ambitious Card in the Live Session.
- Triumph
As we’ve seen, we can work this into our ‘Sliced Bread’ faro wheel. So we can perform regular memorized deck effects in Mnemonica, then shuffle your way into Sliced Bread (I showed you how to do this at the time, in Module 4) and perform Triumph, ending in New Deck Order.
It’s a stunning idea.
Alternatively, I’ve seen it mentioned that if you use Vernon’s Triumph using a mem deck, you can use a named card rather than a physically selected card.
- Out Of This World (OOTW)
Like above, the usual setup for OOTW is a part of the ‘Sliced Bread’ faro wheel. So we can perform regular mem deck pieces and then shuffle our way into the OOTW setup and perform it as a closer (since it destroys the stack, it’s best as a closer—otherwise a deck switch is called for.)
- Dr Daley’s Last Trick
The regular version of this is so strong, I’m not sure we need to do much to it.
That said, here’s one idea:
Using a second deck, let someone freely chose a card and show it to everyone (you included.) Now force the card that is two cards below it in the stack on someone else. If they picked the QH, you force the QC (11 and 13).
Then estimation cut the mem deck so that the first selected card is on top.
You’re actually now set up to perform Dr. Daley’s Last Trick using the two selected cards, but showing them as two indifferent cards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDL_ySPQGA
Of course, you’ll need a dramatic reason to go from having them pick a card to doing Dr Daley’s Last Trick—perhaps you’ve already done an effect with the selected cards and this is presented as just ‘another’ effect…with that kicker ending.
- Card to Wallet
We can make this even stronger than the usual effect by using a freely named card that we estimation cut to the top, rather than a physical selection that we control.
- Torn and Restored Card
Based on Woody Aragon’s ‘Siamese stack’, I came up with the following idea:
The deck is stacked so that the second 26 cards are the mates of the first 26. It’s like a stay stack, but rather than mirroring the first half, it just repeats.
(I later learned that Patrick Redford had a similar idea and coined it the ‘Parallel Stack’)
We could have someone select a card from one half, glimpse to learn the identity, and estimation cut the mate of that card to the top.
We could then perform a Torn and Restored routine by switching their selected card with the new top card and only flashing segments of the card as we tear it (this idea was inspired by ideas from Dani DaOrtiz.)
Since we’re using a mate, it looks like we’re tearing up their card when we only flash small segments when in motion. We could then turn the deck face up, mercury fold the new bottom card, and switch that in as we do in most T&R routines.
- ACAAN
All the best versions of this use a memorized deck. We discussed all the details on this in Module 5.
- Color Changing Deck
Funnily enough, we just discussed that earlier this module, using both a Rubik’s cube and a variation on Hugard’s ‘And The Spectator Blew’ from Greater Magic.
- Oil and Water
See our 16 card version in Module 4.
- Ace Assembly/Ace Production
Ace Assemblies become pretty simple once we know our way around the Quartets principle. We can simply estimation cut each card to the top, false shuffle and false cut, then produce the card from the top of the deck (Benzais Spin Out, Lennart Green’s Top Shot, any way of producing a card off the top will work—even just straight up taking it off the top!)
The beauty of this is that we have all the time in the world to do our estimation cuts—after all, the whole thing is meant to be a demonstration of skill, so they just seem a natural part of the routine.
But at the end of it all, you look much more technically skilled than you really are.
- The Chicago Opener
We actually just explored a sponge ball version of this earlier this Module.
- Sam the Bellhop
The basic idea behind this kind of routine is that you tell a story, and each card you turn over links to the story (for example, you might start by saying “5 years ago…” and show a 5, “…to this day” and show a 2 for the ‘to’.)
Since we’re using a memorized deck, we can build our own story beforehand, then go back and forth between false shuffling and dealing cards.
Woody Aragon had the great idea to do this slightly differently by making up the story as you go along—because you always know which card is coming next, that’s not as hard as it sounds.
- Cutting to the Aces
Since you’ve spent so long working on your estimation cuts, you’re probably closer to this than you think.
The other benefit is that you can do this for ANY Four of a Kind.
Again, you’ll need to be working with the mem deck for a while before you attempt anything like this. And if I were to try it, I’d do it in an informal setting where it’s not going to matter much if it takes me a couple of tries.
- Invisible Deck
Since we know the position of each card in the deck, we could easily estimation cut a card to the top, use the Braue reversal to reverse it, and cut it back to the center. I’ve seen multiple people play with ideas like these, and Aaron Fisher has a good version of it in CC.
- The Rising Card
Again, we can do this with a named card. Just estimation cut it to the top or bottom and do one of the many impromptu versions—such as the classic one using your pinky finger.
- Searching Cards
Mike Close has some good work on this. Again, the main benefit is that we can do it using a freely named card—just control it to the top and proceed as per your favorite method.
- Open Prediction
The memorized deck, again, is perfect for this. We can have a double backer on the table, let the spectator name a card, and estimation cut that card to the top. We then turn over the tabled card using the top card of the deck (“so I don’t even touch it”) using a variation on the Mexican Turnover to ‘show’ that the card on the table is the named card.
- Princess Card Trick
We can perform a neat variation on this effect using the memorized deck and a Chan Canasta subtlety.
We let the spectator cut the deck anywhere and remove the top 5 cards (or spread the deck and make sure they take 5 consecutive cards from anywhere in the spread.)
We glimpse the key card, which tells us the identity of the cards.
We have the spectator fan the cards in front of them and we tell them to think of ONE of the cards.
Here’s the Chan Canasta subtlety:
Tell them “Think of a card. You have one? Good. Now put it behind your back—no, the whole thing.”
What happens here is that when we ask them to ‘put it behind their back’ they start to remove the card they’re thinking of. The minute we see them begin to pull that card out, we can stop them and say “no, the whole thing.”
Because the cards are in memorized order, we know exactly which card they’re thinking of. If they went to remove the second card, we know it’s the second card in our memorized order. If they went to remove the fourth card, we know it’s the fourth card in our memorized order.
Now, once they have all the cards behind their back, we tell them to shuffle the packet and bring it out when they’re satisfied.
(when you think about it, this doesn’t make sense. If they’re just THINKING of a card, it doesn’t matter whether they’re shuffled or not—we should have no idea. But since shuffling is such an accepted and standard notion, it feels natural.)
Now we take the cards, look at them, and place one of them in our pocket. Of course, since we know the identity of their card, this is easy to do.
We ask them to name their card. Once they do, we reveal that it isn’t in our hand—and it is in fact the card we placed in our pocket.
NOTE: Asi Wind also uses this subtlety to great effect in his effect, ‘Crossing Over.’
- Lie Detector
Most versions of this involve the magician forcing a card on their spectator and then revealing it by turning into a human ‘lie detector.’
However, with the memorized deck, they can freely select a card—and once we glimpse, we know it.
- Spelling Tricks
We’ve done a LOT of spelling over this course (and there’s more to come) so I won’t dwell on this too long.
I will say that, with most of the memorized stacks, there’s a group of 5 or so cards that can be spelled to without disturbing the stack order.
That’s because there isn’t as much variety as it seems in spelling cards.
‘Of’ is always going to be 2 letters.
‘Spades’ is always going to be 6.
‘Hearts’ is always going to be 6 (same as Spades.)
‘Clubs’ is always going to be 5.
‘Diamonds’ is always going to be 8.
The only variety is in the value of the card—and even then, it’s mostly going to be similar lengths.
- Triple Coincidence
We looked at a verison of this in Module 4.
- Card Through Window
We could combine this with some of our ‘duo revelations’ ideas. They freely select a card, we glimpse to get the identity, and then reveal the identity to a hidden accomplice via the secret number identity.
(Perhaps we do this as a two phase thing. In the first phase we get a friend to name the card over the phone using the first idea—our hidden accomplice comes in handy for this too—and then the second phase is the card through window. Of course, we’d need to come up with a presentation that works for this.)
The accomplice then loads the card on the window, and the rest is down to us.
So, there’s a few ideas to get the ‘ol gears whirring.
Of course, the list could go on.
But I’ll leave that to you.
After all, that’s half the fun.
Well, that’s a wrap on Module 6.
Let’s hit the FINAL module, where you’ll discover the secret behind my greatest creation…