Ye Olde Magick Blogge

Some guys in my local circle of magician buddies have been getting the damp jeans over Paul Vigil’s trick Diplopia. I don’t want to refer to them directly by name, so let’s just arbitrarily call them… oh, I don’t know… Gamie J Drant and Bes Warker, and I can assure you that there isn’t anybody in Vancouver with those names.

Anyway, if you know Diplopia, and even if you don’t, then there’s basically the issue of method. You’ve got to be able to clock the deck. Now, before I continue, I want to assure you that yes, there’s more to Diplopia than that, and yes, many other tricks have used the idea to (purportedly) great effect, including stuff from Paul Cummins and Harry Lorayne… but here’s my issue.

To clock the deck, you’ve got to go through the deck with the faces to yourself, and gather information.

I recently asked my girlfriend, whom I’m fooled repeatedly with fundamental card stuff, the following question: “If you removed any card from the deck, and I went through the deck myself, how long would it take me to figure out what that removed card was?” She guessed thirty seconds. She didn’t know squat about the specific method and didn’t even assumed that any math might be involved. If I had to guess what her reasoning was, I’d assume this — I’ve got a mental checklist of all 52 cards in the deck, and in running through the faces I’d check off the ones I’ve seen, and whatever card was left unchecked would be the card that was removed. Given some of the other stuff that we can do (take a look at any mentalism book on memory demonstrations), this feels like a perfectly reasonable suspicion.

This, to me, is an important part about understanding intuitive solutions. Tyler Erickson once told me that he’d rather flash a little bit on a pass than a little bit on a side-steal, because the side-steal is an intuitive solution for a card control, whereas a pass is not. Here’s the thing — neither the pass nor the side-steal has an external reality if it’s done correctly at the right time. But how the heck to do you erase from their memory the thirty seconds necessary of you going through the faces to locate their card?

The answer to this is basically that you’re not ostensibly going through the deck to determine your card, but instead to figure out theirs. To that, I have to ask this — where in magic is it ok for a magician to take thirty seconds to try to figure out a card that they took? Through a fan spread, no less? Even with Richard Osterlind’s excellent Test Conditions 2 effect, it doesn’t take longer than five seconds to figure out their card — the external reality is essentially that you just know what their card is, and you need to find it. When you’re at the thirty second level, you’re not just looking for a card, you’re looking for generalized information, and that leads towards the method, and that leads to the method’s ultimate downfall, in my opinion.

And this is assuming you even pull off the effect successfully. I’ve seen people fail with it. Does that mean the method is itself flawed? Probably not, but at the same time, when you’ve got a sleight of hand method down cold, and you’ve got good routine construction around the method, you’ve got a lot of things working in your favour. It’s even possible to design a trick so that the hardest sleight in its construction is the pass, and you flash the pass, and it’s still deceptive! But how the heck do you deal with a situation where you spend thirty seconds going through the cards, and you miscalculate the damned card?

One of the things that people have mentioned as being a plus with Diplopia is that you can work FASDIU with it. Again, I have to wonder if the cost is worth it. To put it another way, when I’m performing professionally, I’m working not just FASDIU, but with a diminishing deck, because I give away the signed cards as souvenirs after the trick. Now, obviously, that means that certain things — such as a memorized deck — are out, but believe it or not, there are some excellent tricks whose methods rely solely on the fact that there are 52 cards in the deck (rather than 48 or 39 or whatever). Anyways, the diminishing deck factor is an inextricable part of my venue. Am I going to trash memdeck work because of it? No, that’s just a question of venue. On the other hand, if we’re going to look at the venue where Diplopia should probably shine, FASDIU with a borrowed deck, is it really the strongest mentalism effect you can do? Is it even the strongest Do As I Do type of mentalism effects you can do?

I’ll be frank, I’ve never performed the trick, and at the moment I’ve got no plans to. Somebody will probably prove me wrong in the near future, I’m sure. Until then, though, Diplopia has been filed in my own personal place of tricks I just won’t do. At this point, though, I want to open the floor to anybody who actually likes this trick and performs it on a regular basis, and let them tell me what a twit I am, and why.

Anybody…?