The Story Is More Than The Trick

“Before the show, I set a prediction.”

Okay.

“I turned one card in this deck of cards opposite to the rest.”

I’m sorry, what?!

“I turned one card face down in this de—”

Whaaaaat are you on about?! All these lights, a stage, we’ve all paid to watch this, and your idea of setting a prediction is turning a card face down in a deck? Did your props get lost on the way to the venue? Did you not think to just remove the card? Why put the card back in the deck at all? Is it because you need to do some kind of sleight of hand?

How bizarre.

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People perform The Invisible Deck in unusual ways. They opt for presentations that not only make no logical sense but also out themselves as someone who doesn’t really care much about their performance.

Y’all ever wonder why it’s called The Invisible Deck?

The original presentation expertly manoeuvres around the necessary outcome for the prediction. You hand the spectator an invisible deck and then take them out of the box, shuffle them up, remove one card, look at it, and place it back in the deck the wrong way around before handing the deck to the magician. Suddenly, the invisible deck becomes visible and, inside, you find, impossibly, the correct reversed card.

All of this original invisible deck presentation is carefully in place to justify the method—and it works. All the fun, disarming procedure puts the audience at ease and, of course, leads to it making sense that there’s a card reversed in the deck. By the time you get to the reveal, you not only expect a card to be reversed, but you want it to be.

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Look, I’m more than happy for you to perform The Invisible Deck as a prediction effect. Many magicians do this, and they do it well. All I am politely asking is that you ask yourself why.

Forget the method.

Focus on the story.

If you have a massive stage with all these other props, then it’s going to look super weird if the way you decided to make a prediction was to flip a card around in a deck. Any normal human will be wondering in the back of their mind why you didn’t write it on a giant poster board or place one card in an envelope. Writing the prediction on an Etch A Sketch might even make more logical sense to an audience.

The truth is that, for most magicians, the only reason a card is reversed in the deck is that’s what the method dictates—not a great reason for a magician to do almost anything.

You don’t always need to give an audience a reason for your actions, but you should always have one in mind. You will telegraph your reason even if you don’t say it aloud.

So, why did you flip a card around in the deck?

• You did it behind your back at random

• It was a last-minute prediction

• You have a superstition where you flip one card around every time you put a deck back into the box

• By pure chance, one card happens to be reversed

The truth is that the producers of the invisible deck considered all of these options and opted to name the trick after the best presentation available.