How Magicians Can Manufacture Miracles

One of the tricks that has fooled me the most was Bang On by Marc Oberon, performed casually to me by Paul Brookes at his magic bar before it opened in Bath, UK.

It’s one of those tricks in which your imagination simply fails to stretch far enough to land on its method, which otherwise would be easy to guess.

In the effect, a card is named freely, and the named card is shown to be predicted inside an envelope in the performer's wallet.

There’s another type of method, rarely discussed by magicians, that works in a similar way. Spectators’ imaginations simply gloss over the idea that this method might be at play. You can use this method to achieve the same effect as Marc Oberon’s Bang On routine — with one small catch: when you perform it, it will always work, but you won’t always be able to perform it.

I once heard this idea to help describe the magic of chance. If I took a jam sandwich out of my pocket, it would not be a trick. However, if you told me you really wanted a jam sandwich, and then I took out a jam sandwich, it would be magic.

The key difference between the two scenarios is the order of events.

That may sound rather simple, and it is, but sit with it. There must be a reason why magicians do not manufacture miracles by chance every day of the week — it can’t just be because magic brands cannot commercialise chance (you wouldn’t want to spend $34.99 on a trick that relies on luck). Perhaps that really is the reason we’re not all walking around set up for 10 miracles at any one time, but it’s nice to believe magic brands don’t hold that much sway on us. We just need a bit of encouragement — consider this your encouragement.

If you have ever seen someone perform tricks with a mnemonica stack deck, you’ll understand the power of chance when it comes to magic. You’ll have seen the performer ask for random cards to be named before improvising the rest of their routines. Occasionally, a spectator will name the top card on the pack, and the magician will do their best to hide their overjoyed reaction before they apparently make the named card appear on top.

The idea is simple — be ready. If the correct trigger occurs (the spectator named the desired card), then you proceed with the manufactured miracle. If, however, a different card gets named, then the performer proceeds with a different trick, and the spectator is left none the wiser that they just skipped past what could have been a miracle.

That’s the key to this — in some ways, it’s like a variation of multiple outs. Try to picture the manufactured miracle as the detour; it takes you in almost the same direction, with the same momentum and themes, but the main road remains the main road.

The goal of a manufactured miracle is to make it a bonus event. The main routine you perform cannot be a consolation prize or a backup — and neither can the miracle.

There are fifty-two cards in a deck of playing cards. If you take two of the cards and place them in “prediction” positions, then suddenly your odds of performing a manufactured miracle are 26 to 1.

Now, those odds might not sound that great, but there are really two things to keep in mind here:

Prediction locations need to be places that feel almost like podiums — seemingly unavoidable displays of something you predict will take place.

Below are three examples you can use:

Consider taking a card, such as the four of hearts, and placing it in an envelope in your wallet. Now, when that card is named or chosen during a routine, you suddenly have a manufactured miracle to end your routine with. Open your wallet, take out the envelope and show that before the trick even began, you knew they’d choose the four of hearts.

Consider taking a black marker and writing on the back of your card box, “You Will Choose the Queen of Hearts.” Now, you can end or begin any routine by revealing the prediction you wrote down on the card box before you even arrived that day.