As I mentioned last time, this is an idea that occurred to me while reading Matt Baker’s excellent ‘The Buena Vista Shuffle Club’, in a routine called ‘Outlier.’
In case you didn’t catch last week’s effect, the basic idea is that we have what FEELS like a deck of 52 blank cards, but is actually 104 ‘ultrathin’ cards—52 blank cards with the 52 cards of our stack ‘hidden’ behind the blank cards.
Here’s how to set that up…
“1. You’ll need to pick up a custom deck of cards from the link below.
https://www.card-shark.de/?page=20&lang=en&detail=true&Category=7&ArtID=142
(In case you’re reading this at a later date and the above link no longer works, the product is a ‘Phoenix Double Decker’ deck)
You’ll want to select ‘blank face decks with red backs’ and then any of the ‘1x standard deck’ combinations. You’ll end up with a spare deck, but that’s okay.
Once you’ve got them, you’ll have 52 ultrathin blank cards and 52 ultrathin regular cards.
But how do you join them so every blank card/stack card handles like one?
Again, I have to credit Matt Baker for introducing this genius idea to me…
- Science Friction
Science Friction is a magic product that allows you to ‘glue’ two cards together while still being able to detach them at will.
Here’s the link:
https://www.penguinmagic.com/p/9981
It’s not super cheap, but once you get it, you’ll be able to use it for a whole bunch more than just this trick.
(in fact, I think they teach you a whole bunch of tricks and techniques when you buy the spray).
Alternatively, I believe this would also work with regular ‘Roughing Fluid’ which you CAN pick up cheap.
Either way, you want the cards to adhere to each other so you can spread to show the blank cards without revealing the stack cards beneath them—but easy enough to separate that you can do so when you need to display the chosen card.”
Last week I showed you how to leverage this genius idea for the ACAAN effect, but this week I wanted to give you some ‘quickfire’ effects and ideas that you can explore and play with yourself.
Here are my top 3…
- Mnemonicosis
If you own ‘Mnemonica’, you should be familiar with this routine by now.
The spectator names a card, and you get them to cut the deck (guiding them to the rough area where their card is—”cut about half” or “cut about a quarter” or “cut about two thirds”). A good number of times, they’ll cut straight to their card!
But when they don’t, they will almost always cut close enough that we can simply look at what card they cut to and ‘jazz’ to their card.
For example, if their card is the 3H (28) and they cut at the 6H (23), and their name is Rose…
We might spell ‘Rose’, dealing 4 cards and then turning over the next facedown card to show the 3H.
Or we might spell ‘Three’, turning over the card on the ‘e’ to show the 3H.
It’s one of my favorite things to do with the memorized deck, and when you know what to look for you’ll see mem deck performers busting it out left right and centre—including on David Blaine’s TV specials.
So how do we do this with the blank deck we’ve set up?
Afterall, we can’t tell what card they’ve cut to, since the stack card is hidden beneath the blank card, right?
Well, here’s where I introduce you to one of the coolest parts of this whole setup (that I didn’t even talk about last week)…
The Phoenix Double Decker deck that we’re using is MARKED.
Yep.
How cool is that?
And since the stack cards are stuck to the back of the blank cards, we’re seeing the back of the stack cards at all times.
Or in other words…the faces are blank, but the backs are marked—and those markings tell us which card is hidden beneath the blank face.
So let’s say we’re performing for our friend Rose again.
This time, she names the 6S, so we encourage her to cut about a quarter of the deck—but not to turn the cards face up yet. (no need to show the blank faces yet.)
She cuts a packet of cards and lifts them from the deck without turning them face up.
Let’s say we look at the markings on the card on top of the remainder of the deck and see the 2D (card #19.)
That means the bottom card of her packet is the KC (#18)
Since she wants the 6S (#15), we know her card is the 4th card up from the bottom of her packet.
(18, 17, 16, 15)
Her name is ‘Rose’, so we might spell ‘Rose’ by sliding cards one at a time from the bottom of the packet, keeping them face down.
We remove the 4th card, lay it on top of the facedown pile as we pause to remind Rose that SHE named the card, SHE cut, and we used HER name. Pick up the card, this time separating the stack card from the blank card.
We show her that she somehow found her exact named card—the 6S.
But even more impressive, we show her that she managed to name the only card in the deck—we turn all the other cards face up to show that they’re all blank.
Goosebumps again.
- ‘Mix’ the deck
Recall my comments on how we can convince the spectators the deck is ‘mixed’ when really all we’ve done is cut it?
If you don’t, let me jog your memory…
“When I say ‘mix’, I’m really simply referring to ‘cuts.’
HOWEVER, this isn’t just semantics.
There’s a reason I say ‘mix.’
When we do it right, we can make cutting the deck FEEL like ‘mixing’ the deck.
In my way of thinking—the more we refer to it as such in OUR mind, the more natural it should feel to convince the audience of it when we do so.
I use two main strategies for this:
- Give the audience the chance to cut the deck as many times as they like, and remind them each time that ‘every time you cut, you change the order of the cards. If you stop here, we’ll have a certain order. If you cut one more time, that order will be changed. Once this trick is over, I want you to remember that you COULD have made just one more cut if you wanted to.’
Doing this both emphasises the ‘control’ they have over the order of the cards, and makes for a fun moment where they can tell you’re trying to get in their head and don’t know what to do.
Of course, needless for me to say, we don’t care either way—as long as they’re giving the deck single cuts, our memorized order is going to maintain itself.
- Take the deck back, and then ask for a number between 1 and 20. Once they give you that number, ask them if they want you to move that many cards from top to bottom, or bottom to top. Whatever they say, do so, but make sure you count the cards without reversing their order.
I first saw Dani DaOrtiz use this ploy in his ‘Or Not’ effect, and it’s pure genius.
Really, all you’re doing is cutting the deck. It’s no different.
But for some reason, asking them to name a number, and then choosing whether the cards come off the bottom or top, makes the whole thing FEEL more like ‘mixing’ than cutting.
It also creates the illusion that the number of cards they choose, or where they choose to move them, is important (it isn’t, it’s just a cut either way.)
When the effect ends, they may well end up asking the wrong questions entirely (“what if I’d said to move 10 cards instead of 9?”), and of course, if they’re asking the wrong questions, they’re never going to find the right answers.”
Now, at the time I was referring to how this technique can be used during the ACAAN effect.
However, we can actually use this principle quite nicely with our blank deck too…
The audience can ‘mix’ the deck as much as they like, but they won’t disrupt the stack. And since, as I explained before, the deck is marked on the backs…we can simply look at the top card and know where any other card in the deck is.
For example…
Let’s say they cut and ‘mix’ the deck a whole bunch. When they’re done, we see the top card is the JS (card #45).
We’re going to do a super simple effect that looks quite impossible:
Get them to name any card. Let’s say they name the 6C (card #50).
Since we know the top card is the 45th card, we know the 6C is the 6th card down.
(45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50.)
Now we’re simply going to force the 6th card—by cutting it to the top and then setting up the dribble force, riffle force, or classic force.
We force the 6C on them, ensuring we separate it from the blank card as we do so. They turn it over and see that they ‘freely’ chose the card they named!
But then, we raise the power of the effect by spreading the rest of the cards to show every other card is blank!
Not only did they pick the card they named after ‘mixing’ the deck…they named the only card in the deck!
Fun, huh?
Alright, this third one is a really cool one…
Actually, I’m running out of time—so I think I’ll wait and share this one next week.
Have fun with the above two ideas in the meantime 🙂
Your friend,
Benji