Lessons From A Magic Prototype

Here’s the trick—you, the magician, shuffle a deck of cards. Then you, still the magician, hand the playing cards to a friend.

Here’s what your friend will do—they’ll deal down face-down cards onto the table. Whenever they want, they can stop. At which point, they’re going to peek at the next card. No one else in the room will see it. They’ll do their best to remember its suit and value. And then, they’ll continue dealing down.

Actually, that’ll take too long—so they can combine all the cards and shuffle them up. They can shuffle the deck however they like. Your friend sucks at shuffling. It’s just a total mess of cards.

Did I mention that you, the magician, are on the other side of the room? Heck, you can even be on in another room. You can stay there or return to your friend. You look at your friend deep in their eyes, deep into their soul.

The six of spades.

You say calmly.

You’re thinking of the six of spades.

Your friend never forgets this moment.

Most magicians and consultants have what I refer to as dream effects. You usually hear them recant their ideas prefaced with a line such as if I had the money or if all the conditions were just right. They’re pipe dreams, impractical, silly, and close to impossible.

This trick is one of these.

I’ve had the idea for many years. I had the idea after refusing to learn mnemonica. Yes, we get it; you’ve learned mnemonica—congratulations. I bought a marked deck. Will spectators tell the difference? Would they be equally impressed by the invisible deck? Can we debate this another time?

I’m trying to make these posts more and more concise. The goal is to stuff them with the same amount of value. Before we get to the method, which does work by the way, here are three takeaways:

Make It Work Before You Make It Beautiful.

Illusion designer Paul Kieve taught me this. If you have an idea for a method, forget about fooling people. Start by making a method that works. This might mean using glowing neon thread instead of invisible thread. It might mean duct-taping a gimmick together instead of expertly super glueing it. It could mean exposing the method rather than hiding it at all.

Get Inspired By Everything.

I previously wrote a post about when theory11 told me (understandably) that they would not credit me on the packaging of the board game I was writing and how that inspired the entire backstory of the NPH board game BoxOne. I extend upon this in my new book and write about stealing back inspiration for a Justin Willman Netflix routine. For this prototype, the entire idea came from being reluctant to do the hard work and learn mnemonica.

It Doesn’t Need To Work.

I had this idea for several years and never made it as I was never sure it would work. Lloyd Barnes told me the other week the method would likely work if you got the spectator to deal down onto the card box. This suggestion will make sense very soon. So, confident it might work, I built this prototype. Having built it, I discovered you do not need a card box for the method to work. I should have tried making it before.

Here’s the working prototype:

The app listens out for the sound of cards as they get dealt. The cards are regular, can be borrowed, and placed into mnemonica—which is how the app knows the identity of each card as it’s dealt.

Lloyd’s solid suggestion was that dealing onto the card box would result in more noise. This fact is true, though it turns out the iPhone mic and software is smart enough to hear the smallest of sounds.

So long as you don’t happen to be in a loud nightclub… or a reasonably noisy cafe, the phone can hear every time you deal down onto the table.

You’re smart enough to come up with some cool peeks. Perhaps the cards are displayed on an Apple watch. An Airpod could be hidden on the table, sending the sound to your phone with you elsewhere.

Maybe there’s no live peek, and upon returning to your phone, the small-time display at the top of the screen is now the selected playing card. This could be determined by the pause in dealing as the spectator remembers their playing card.

Heck, why not go all in and have the app automatically save a correct prediction to your photos or notes app. You’ll come up with something smart.

Is it going to be an award-winning idea—no, not at all. Was it worth toying with, and will it lead to other concepts—yes, I think so.