Learn an Impossible Card Trick

Perhaps one of the strangest things about magic consulting is the bizarre reasons to stress out. Shoots can get overwhelming and looking back, be totally ridiculous. Here are the three most stressful moments of my life as a magic consultant.

I can’t begin to describe how stressful each of these felt:

1. Someone’s feet were bigger than expected.

2. Someone kissed something they were not supposed to.

3. Z-List Celeb Pat Sharp didn’t believe in ghosts.

1… I remember sprinting across London, sweating, phoning every prop maker in my contact list after being told the contributor* on set had humongous feet.

2…When she kissed the thing she wasn’t supposed to, I turned on the spot and sprinted 200 metres, pushing through members of the public, grabbing my radio and begging every owner of lipstick on the crew to drop what they were doing and race to me.

3…The 40-person night-shoot entirely relied upon Pat Sharp believing in ghosts, and he didn’t, and I’ll never forgive him for it.

* Contributors or “contribs” are the spectators in TV magic shows.

Of course, there are also genuine moments to stress out in television…

1. When I was 21, I was far too young to be the one deciding if we needed to repeat a stunt at 2 AM in the rain that put the stunt person’s life in danger, based on whether we caught the magic on camera well enough on the first take.

2. Gordon Ramsay once cut his finger because of me, that was a tense five seconds before he laughed it off graciously.

Consulting is a strange and weird job that’s fairly misunderstood, even by the magic community. But every consultant I know has at least one hilariously silly and stupidly stressful story. My favourite two involve a monkey on her period and a sex doll unexpectedly deflating.

In these stressful moments, my coping mechanism is to take a step back, take out my phone, and capture a photo of whatever is in front of me. Something about seeing the photo snaps me out of the moment and reminds me how silly and weird and dumb my job can often be.

I have a brilliant photo of the talented Robert Pound, Marc Kerstein, Troy and Andrew O’Connor, all holding onto my shoe as though their lives depended on it.

Remarkably, this is a different shoe incident to the one at the top of this post.

Stick to What You Know

It’s at stressful times that I try to stick to what I know. And I actually recommend doing this whenever writing and producing magic. Looking for methods is tough, so don’t look for them while also trying to create a trick.

Use the rest of your time to look out for new methods. When you’re not putting together new magic, find methods everywhere—when you watch films, YouTube, when you’re chatting to friends about their work or reading books.

We All Know the Invisible Deck

The spectator mimes reversing a card in an invisible deck, when the deck becomes real, the magician spreads it to reveal the card they freely named is upside down. It’s effortless to perform and is repeatable and cheap to perform. Magicians love it.

It’s even easier to perform over zoom, with the cards held facing your face, as there’s no mental math required.

I wince when I see magicians perform the invisible deck as a prediction effect. There’s a reason it’s called the invisible deck and not the prediction deck. If you were going to predict a named playing card, why would you do it by turning one card over in a deck of cards? The entire presentation of handing someone an invisible deck, asking them to turn an invisible card over in the pack was carefully crafted to justify the strange format of the prediction/ending, requited only by the method.

I know this only winds me up because I’m the kind of consultant hired to write tricks, rather than make the things. I would never write the invisible deck to be a prediction, but you are forgiven if you perform it that way.

The invisible deck's best variations go to my old boss Justin Willman on Jay Leno and Cyril Takayama in the clip below. They beat you to it, and you’re not allowed to copy their routines, pal.

Willman dumps 52 decks of cards over Jay Leno’s desk, each with a different card reversed and performed a coincidence trick. The whole thing felt chaotic, and random and funny. I remember smiling wide when I watched this as a teen. I also thought it would be fun to place a normal deck of cards with one card reversed under every seat in a theatre, then place one invisible deck under the chair of the spectator you plan to choose at “random.”

Takayama performed a spectacular triumph routine with a cocktail shaker. Takayama and Willman are two absolute pros, and it really goes to show how magicians at the top of their game perform everyday tricks in unique amazing ways. I wrote about Justin’s brilliant knack for this in my first subscriber-only post here.

*Triumph is a classic card routine in which the cards are mixed face up and face down, then they all turn the correct way except for a named card. Asi Wind has a lovely take on this here and oh my god it’s cheap.

Onto a second somewhat related rant. Occasionally, a magician will discover my job and begin to moan about TV magicians performing magic that working magicians can’t perform at their gigs too. And that it’s all my fault that spectators have unrealistic expectations. If I can’t immediately escape, I try my best to assure them TV magicians are all mostly performing off-the-shelf tricks—and they never believe me. Nonetheless, magic in your hands is stronger than anything you could see on the telly. If anyone should worry about how laypeople feel watching live magic following TV magic—it’s the TV magicians, who make zero money from TV and all their money from corporate gigs and live tours.

Anyways, here’s a fun trick inspired by the invisible deck method. It’s enough to get you thinking of more uses. I should say though, that what I ended up with below is, in fact, closer to a brainwave deck. Please comment below your invisible deck ideas, I’m looking forward to reading and replying.

Ingredients:

• 26 queens of clubs with rough faces

• 26 queens of spades with rough faces

• Two full suits of red cards with rough faces

• One random card with a rough face

• One random card with no roughing.

• 1 queen of clubs with a rough face

• 1 queen of spades with a rough back

Use spray mount to rough the cards.

I found two black queen one-way decks on eBay for £4.28 each - that’s enough for two gaff decks. I used two regular decks and a roughing stick I already had at home to produce two gaff decks for this trick. Only one gaff deck is needed, so you get a spare one.

Preparation:

The cards could be in this order, queens facing upwards, with the rest face down:

*rough back queen*, *rough face queen*, *rough face random card*, AC, QH, 2C, QD, 3C, QH, 4C, QD, 5C, QH, 6C, QD, 7C, QH, 8C, QD, 9C, QH, 10C, QD, JC, QH, QC, QD, KC, QH, AS, QD, 2S, QH, 3S, QD, 4S, QH, 5S, QD, 6S, QH, 7S, QD, 8S, QH, 9S, QD, 10S, QH, JS, QD, QS, QH, KS, *random normal card*

The random normal card is face down on the bottom of the pack. Ideally this card is a random black card, like the eight of clubs. So when spectators see it they convince themselves the deck is a normal pack of black and red cards.

How it Cooks:

Here goes nothing…

The Magician asks the spectator to name red or black…

…Let’s say they name black…

The Magician asks the spectator to name any black card in the deck.

She then takes the two red queens, for contrast.

She places them face up on top of the face-down deck.

With a classic wave of her hand, they vanish into the deck.

She spreads through the deck until she finds the two face-up queens.

Sandwiched between them is one face down playing card—the spectator’s card.

…Let’s say they name red…

The Magician takes two red queens from the deck.

She places them face up on top of the face-down deck.

Then she asks the spectator to name any black card, for contrast.

With a classic wave of her hand, they vanish into the deck.

She spreads through the deck until she finds the two face-up queens.

Sandwiched between them is one face down playing card—the spectator’s card.

Method:

You’re using equivoke to force the spectator to name a random black card from the deck. If they answer red, you say you’ll use the red queens, as though they made that decision, before asking them to name a random black card for them to find. If they say black, you ask them to name any black card and say you’ll use the red queens to find them for contrast.

You then perform a classic change to make the two face up red queens vanish from the top of the deck (to below that random rough face card). JB teaches this change for free here.

Much like the brainwave deck, you then simply count down the face-down paired cards, ace, two three, until you get to their card, and you press apart the queen above and below their named card.

This does mean that sometimes the queen of clubs will be the top card in the sandwich, and sometimes it will be the queen of spades. But there’s logical reason for them to be a specific way round in the minds of the spectator, so it works.

To make this trick easier, use marked cards, so no counting is required.

Be sure to open the deck the correct way around; you may wish to mark the box and top card with a sharpie that matches the card's back colour.

Feel Inspired

I’m briefly teaching this variation in the hopes that it will inspire you to come up with your own card tricks using rough cards, the invisible deck and the brainwave deck concepts. Best of luck.

I’m Finding My Way

I’m going to try a bunch of different post formats. I’ll be digging up some brilliant old magic stories, teaching tricks, putting together playlists of the best off-the-shelf magic tricks and breaking down my favourite magic performances. Be sure to like and comment posts you want to see.