7 Variations Of Bestselling Tricks

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…

Making magic your own > making your own magic.

Laypeople will not know or care if your trick is a version of something that already exists. They will notice if a trick feels unique to you. Avoid all that risk that comes with inventing new magic and spend your time making great magic your own.

Justin Flom is one of the kings of this, alongside Justin Willman.

As a consultant, magicians will often tell you they want to perform a variation of a shop-bought trick. They likely love the trick, realise that it is tried and tested, and may even already perform it. Now they want to perform it in their original way.

An example of this was when Dynamo asked us to create a unique version of French Kiss by Wayne Houchin. We only made a tiny tweak to the trick, but our only goal was for D to perform an individual variation. Some might view it as an unnecessary addition, but I think being able to show the card a second time right before it goes into his mouth is rather neat.

So that’s the buy-in…

I’ve given you a real-world example of consultants making slight variations to tricks and a bunch of great reasons you should be doing the same, like reducing risk.

What amazes me is how many magicians perform tricks precisely as they arrive out of the box. Sometimes, even the smallest of changes can make a significant impact.

Let’s take a look at a few examples today. I’ll try to come up with these and type them live as I sit here on a Wednesday evening. I’ll pull up the Penguin Magic bestsellers and go from there.

This overpriced best seller is already a variation of the classic cigarette ash on palm trick. Which sort of proves the point of this post.

I think the first variation that comes to mind is to double-up the equivoke.

I’d draw, with a permanent marker, a circle on my palm before the trick begins.

During the performance, I draw the circle with my palm facing myself, then lower my hand so everyone can see me draw the cross alongside the circle.

I’d ask the spectator to name one of the shapes. Regardless of the shape they call, I’ll make the cross vanish and reappear on their palm within their closed fist.

“Circle? Great — I’ll keep the circle here and make the cross vanish….”

“Cross? Great — I’ll make the cross vanish and reappear…. “

I suppose you could likely get away with doing the entire thing in one flow on the spectator’s hand, so long as you switch a regular sharpie for the gimmick after you draw the circle.

The quality of this particular trick proves that any trick can be a best seller if you pin it to the home page of Penguin Magic for seven years.

Look, it’s obvious. Do not use a playing card for this trick.

Build the gimmick with a debit or credit card instead.

Use a debit card, use a train ticket, use a bar matt, use a receipt, or anything other than a playing card, you Nerd.

Btw, the following three tricks, which I’ve now deleted from this post, were basically all PLEASE USE ANYTHING BUT CARDS. I think it’s worth noting that I have never worked on a television show that the channel hasn’t told to avoid card tricks at all costs.

Here’s another trick that is already a variation of a classic, this time, it’s the pen through bill. I like this a lot. People carry chapstick more than pens now that phones are a thing.

Plus, the chapstick allows for a new visual push through the bill.

The most linear variation here is to use a glue stick and perhaps perform this in a classroom with some kids on a telly show. That’s maybe the first place my brain goes. I’d use a child artwork instead of the dollar bill, which they’d likely feel a more emotional connection towards, too.

At some point, I’ll write about my theory for making a million dollars from a magic trick release. One of the rules is to create a product people already carry with them, be it chapstick, a sharpie, pen, watch or, in this case — a mint box.

Garcia is great, and the gimmick works excellent. It’s an odd one for television because your first motivation is to remove the need for the switch. So, if we’re keeping the switch, it means we can only alter the objects or add a flourish.

To add a flourish, I’d likely come up with a lovely way to change their folded signed card into a handful of mints. So we then, as an audience, look over to the mint box and realise what’s about to happen.

If we’re changing the object away from cards, I’d probably go with a scratch card because it has the same rough shape and thickness as a playing card. It’ll work with the gimmick, and there’s something weirdly endearing about keeping a lucky object inside a mint box.

The mint box gets placed in the hero’s open palm, and then everyone in the group chooses numbers. Then the scratch card gets dumped out and unfolded; we see all the freely named numbers written upon it.

Behind the scenes, a consultant is printing the correct scratch card numbers onto a bill. Btw, stamping is much faster and more reliable than printing for most use cases. You can buy stick-on scratch material, so you could very much dump out a yet-to-be-scratched scratch card.

The number of times I suggest printing custom force pads or using TopTrump decks, and a magician will turn around and suggest we just write on a blank deck or black SvenPad to save cash…

Book printing is so affordable these days; it’s insane. Just ask Andi Gladwin. Only Ideas cost £1.45 to print. I hope you’re feeling way too impressed at the low cost of book printing to calculate how much I marked up those books.

There are very few situations where it makes sense to write something down on every notepad page. Perhaps a shopping list or something. But if you want to force something that does not make sense in the context of a memo book, please consider the extra effort.

So I suppose by variation here is to print your own book. Be it a songbook, baby name book, sudoku book or anything you want. I quite like the idea of printing a SvenPad crossword puzzle book with the force pages only featuring one long word, and the spectator gets tasked to flick to a random page and choose a big word from the page.

For the most part, SvenPads are the lazy and immediate option — especially if they’re seen on screen. Anyways, this is more of just a rant that if you’ve been forcing an animal e for the last three years at your corporate gigs with a SvenPad, to perhaps consider investing in a custom children’s animal names book. Go figure.

Oh hey, another trick that’s already a variation of a successful trick (the coin bite). So this variation is not from the top of my head, but you could dunk the cookie into milk, lift it, and display in horror that a chunk fell into the milk… before magically restoring it by dipping it back in.

Has anyone made white oreo cookie bites yet? You could take a bite from one colour oreo and spit the piece onto another oreo such that it restores mismatched.

Holy shit, there’s a lot of oreo flavours out there.

This is a best-seller, but it’s featured in this post so you can stop what you’re doing and watch the trailer that Richard Curtis directed.

If a magician challenged me to develop a variation of this trick, I would lose my respect for them, but I would not lose the challenge because I’m too stubborn.

Here’s what I’d do. I’d have the magician remove the cover from a standard standing fan while speaking to the hero at a… I don’t know… at a handmade jewellery store. And while they chat, the magician would start glueing red jewels onto the blades of the fan. At the end of their conversation, the magician would plug in the fan, and when it rotates at speed, the jewels will create a fan-tastic word reveal to do with the conversion.

Then, presumably, the magician would give me a raise, and I would leave the project long before Alan Rorrison gets tasked with building the impossible prop.