A Voodoo Card Trick Method

First, the magician spreads the deck to find the king of diamonds and places it face up on top of the face-up deck.

Then the magician takes out a black Sharpie marker and hands it to the spectator.

The spectator is informed that we are going to treat this king like a voodoo doll.

What they must do is draw a black cross somewhere on the king’s body, like on its face, heart, stomach, or hand, and see what happens.

For this example, let’s say they draw a cross on the king's hand.

The magician then spreads through the deck, and the spectator removes the king’s pairing card from the pack — that’s the other red king, the king of hearts.

To the spectator's surprise, this second king also has a cross drawn on his hand.

Amazing, but that could be a coincidence, so we repeat the process with the queen of diamonds.

This time, the spectator draws a cross on the queen’s face — rather cruel.

To everyone’s amazement, when the magician openly spreads through the deck and the spectator retrieves the corresponding red queen of hearts, despite it being the only queen of hearts in the deck, its face also has a cross through it.

The trick ends here, but it does not have to.

This routine does make for a great introduction to a double-cross performance. Placing the cards aside, you then draw a cross on your hand, and it travels onto the spectator’s.

The effect is designed to be a charming trick to perform for a friend.

It’s a satisfying routine for both the spectator and performer.

This trick relies on one timeless magic principle and a tried-and-tested mechanic.

The good news is that it’s easy to perform, and you can swap the prepared cards into any deck whenever you wish.

For this trick, we use a variation of multiple outs, meaning that different pairing cards are retrieved depending on the choices the spectator makes.

Specifically, four outs per court card (face, hand, heart, and stomach).

You can expand the method to allow more locations of the card to be crossed out by the spectator, but the truth is, there aren't many possible locations to cross out in the first place.

It’s best to point at the four positions on the card when you describe them to the spectator.

To prepare the four outs, gather four queens of hearts and four kings of hearts.

Take a black marker pen, and draw one cross on each card so that each set of queens and kings has one card with a cross in each of the four locations.