Ye Olde Magick Blogge

Chapter 20, Platform Tricks

In this final chapter, we get to one of the reasons why I think Royal Road, if studied thoroughly, is much more than just a beginner’s text. Frankly, if you could master some of the stuff in here, you’d be in the upper echelon of modern card magicians. Some of these plots are up there with the things Ricky Jay and Michael Vincent are doing, and we could always use more stage card magic to choose from just so everybody isn’t doing the Invisible Deck. Again, I don’t do these tricks, so I’m critiquing them from the point of view of how I imagine they’d play out.

“Conus Ace Trick”

This is pretty good. I like the fact that the magician establishes a certain amount of ability with the four aces before upping the ante to having them travel to the inner pocket of the assistant’s jacket when it’s been buttoned up. Such jackets are not as commonplace in casualwear as they might have been a long time ago, so it might be somewhat problematic to perform in that regard. That said, I like the opportunity for byplay and the three-act structure of the thing, prior to the apparent climax. Three things here that I think are drawbacks — first, the authors could have been clearer about the outs necessary for getting the other aces into position just in case the spectator doesn’t say “Two on the top and two on the bottom”; second, if you’ve put a crimp into a packet of cards so that the crimp is visible from a distance, taking those crimps out without getting detected isn’t exactly a trivial task (this specific feature of the cards is what makes the famous pop-up card climax in the Ambitious Card routine possible); third, the amount of misdirection needed to get rid of the indifferent card (after the aces are shown to have vanished from under the spectator’s hands) would need to be massive — I could see it working, but even dumping the aces on the face of the deck would allow you to accomplish pretty much exactly the same thing without having to worry about getting caught on an unnecessary acquitment of the indifferent card. Also, I’d probably try to find a way to ditch the aces in the pocket whilst fetching the card box, or something like that. Still, the feints in the middle are fun, and that climax ought to be a good one. If one could get past the problems mentioned earlier (and which I might be over-paranoid about) then this would be a really strong card routine.

One thought on taking the crimp out of the aces… one could turn the deck over and do a strong pressure fan (bunching the aces up at the top so that they’re not visible) and show it to the assistant, saying “…and please verify that there aren’t any other Aces here.” (or something like that, perhaps less bold?). This would fit the way the trick is going presentationally while getting the bend out of the aces.

“Ladies’ Looking Glass”

I’m genuinely torn on this one. I do multiple-selection routines all the time when I work, and I’m pretty much biased towards a plot wherein the cards are revealed in increasingly impressive ways, rather than doing the same thing over and over. For this sort of trick to work, I believe that the movelessness of it has to be played up incredibly high — handling would have to get reduced to just about nothing, since I feel that the spectators could disregard the possibility of duplicates and instead just think you just somehow controlled their actual selections to the top and bottom, which is a fair suspicion given what we’re capable of doing. As such, when you’re there and palming off and setting the duplicates, it seems really risky to me. Also, I think it’s unreasonable and unnecessary to ask spectators to remember more than one card.

Now, that said, the visual of the magician having the deck sit on an open palm, and just sort of shaking the cards lightly, and then making a card that the spectator is convinced is in the middle rise to the top, seems quite magical to me. I’d almost want to have the hand rotate so that the cards are going back and forth and not up and down, as if you were holding a bowl of water and swirling it about. Also, plucking two cards out of the air in the manner described is a nice climax — I think it’s cleaner from a proper palm, so I’d go that route, but the climax is still a nice one.

So… yeah, dunno what to think. I believe if one were to do this sort of trick after having done some really impressive stuff with sleight of hand already, and they were able to get the handling down so that it looked really, really clean, it could be a nice trick.

“Everywhere and Nowhere”

Now THIS is an interesting trick. Created long ago by the venerable Mr. Hofzinser, many modern card magicians try to show this trick as a classic of card magic. Below are Michael Vincent and Tommy Wonder doing it, and if you go hunting you might be able to find Ricky Jay’s take on it.

On the surface, this seems like it should be a very strong trick, but to be honest, there’s something almost unsatisfying about it to me. If you’ve got the power to make several indifferent cards or an entire deck of cards change into a selection, that sort of renders the whole pick-a-card thing as a mundane exercise, doesn’t it? What’s more, Roberto Giobbi mentioned that the only really satisfying way of doing this trick is to use duplicates… and yet, if you let them catch onto the fact that you’re using duplicates, there’s not a whole lot of magic going on, is there? For a while I was obsessed with trying to find a fulfilling way of doing this trick, but I ended up dropping it for other plots. I think there’s something telling about the fact that just about every trick from Ricky Jay’s 52 Assistants show is easily found except for this one. And, on a Magic Cafe thread, Michael Vincent had the following to say about it: “It has taken me 100s of performances to come to the realisation that the high point of this effect is the first revelation. After that, the effect goes down hill and nothing you do will rescue the effect from that point on.”

Now, I do think that this particular approach in Royal Road has a lot going for it, since it almost takes the trickster’s way out. I think that lowering their expectations, so that they believe that you’re using many duplicate cards, only to show that you’ve been fair all along, can actually create a strangely compelling paradox in the minds of a spectator — assuming you’re offering compelling proof that the cards are gone, it’s as though you’re capable of real magic powers, but you’re downplaying the hell out of them, rather than putting them on display. The idea is essentially this — you want the audience to feel like it’s catching you in the midst of trickery, only to then turn the tables on them. This means that it’s not enough to just do the trick… you’ve got to be the sort of performer who’s happy to get into a cat-and-mouse game with the spectators, to let the atmosphere reek of trickery, only to then have that fog clear to reveal the magic.

You also, in my opinion, need to make proper use of the duplicates. The spectators have to come to the suspicion that you have duplicates, but I don’t think they’re allowed to actually see two cards at once. So, for instance, you’ve got the magician holding a card in one hand, and there’s another card on the table. The magician flashes the eight of spades, and then gestures towards the next card. The eight of spades is tabled face-down. The other card is turned over and it is shown to be the eight of spades. Once all attention goes towards the original card, it has to be turned over to show it’s now some indifferent card. It has to be that clean and that open (with no extra contact with the cards to suggest a switch was possible) so that the only possible explanation is that you’ve got duplicates, at which point you show that there aren’t any other eight of spades anywhere. Many modern magicians have tried to make the “Everywhere” part of “Everywhere and Nowhere” obvious, and I think that’s a mistake. The magic shouldn’t be that you’ve made several cards (or the entire deck) become the eight of spades, but rather that the eight of spades can appear where it needs to be. In my opinion, that’s a subtle, but important, difference.

As such, while the plot and the moves aren’t all that complicated, I think this is an extremely advanced trick from the point of view of showmanship. It’s almost like it’s Hofzinser’s version of Fermat’s Last Theorem, a puzzle put forth to plague and confound future upper-echelon card magicians who really want to make their marks as artists.

So, yeah, do this one at your own risk. Otherwise, though, I think Royal Road’s approach is fine construction-wise, although I’d want to tweak the script at the end. To what, exactly, I have no idea…

“Egyptian Pocket”

A Vancouver magician by the name of Travis Bernhardt named this trick as the one from the book he’d really like to see someone do, and I (having overlooked it the first time) went back to re-read it and immediately was forced to agree. The basic description of it is really compelling… Four cards are chosen by spectators, returned to the deck, which is shuffled and then placed into the spectator’s pocket. The spectator is told to reach in and just grab a card. He does so, and succeeds in finding three of them, but cannot find the fourth. The deck is removed, and the spectator blows on his pocket, finding the fourth card there. The magician then points out that the spectator blew too hard, and all of a sudden he starts pulling out fistfulls of cards — from the text, “an avalanche of cards” — out of the various pockets.

This will require some fairly bold work on the part of the performer to pull off, but the trick just reads great. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you’re an intrepid soul), nobody’s doing this trick, so we don’t have any footage of it, but I imagine that if somebody did it and performed it well, he’d become an instant sensation in the magic community.

“Cards to the Pocket”

This is a classic plot, and I’m going to have to defer to Hugard and Braue that this is a workable construction for it. I do know that the approach for the last card — the usual Achilles’ Heel for this trick — actually looks great if it’s done well (the aforementioned Mr. Bernhardt does this quite capably). It’s an interesting approach to try to get the audience to remember the identity of the cards — this can sort of lead them somewhat astray so that they’ll be unprepared for the first move, which gets you very far ahead, but the count later on to show five cards as seven risks somebody noticing that the same card has been shown multiple times. I wonder if it’s necessary to do the count faces-out, but the suggested body-turning strategy seems like it should both work and be very disarming. The handling for the fifth card’s voyage is bold, although considering the whole damn trick is bold, it should have strong climax potential (as the authors suggest). The rest of the trick reads well, and that final card steal does look great if it’s well executed (certainly much better than I originally thought it would from reading it, and frankly, I think it’s at least as good as — if not superior to — other ideas you’ll find).

Now, I’m a coward, so I’d probably want to use fewer cards, and probably do something more akin to Paul Potassy’s approach, where you’re using a bit more subterfuge to make the cards jump to various pockets, but I think this trick has a lot going for it. You get way ahead early, you’ve got a nice mid-routine moment, and the final card’s vanish can look great.

“Enlarging and Diminishing Cards”

I think the authors are on the right track about using this sort of trick as part of a larger routine of the “Cards Up The Sleeve” variety. A performer would need to really leverage his presentational ability in order to make sure that it’s not obvious that the card fans have anything to do with the method. The authors suggest that Robert-Houdin used it as a follow-up to “Cards Up The Sleeve” — I think that would require careful routining in order to get the most out of that moment where an entire fan of cards is pulled out. Having watched John Carney do the trick, with large messes of cards coming out, and cards sometimes getting stuck, all in the hope of trying to find the one card the spectator selected (which ends up being the only card that doesn’t travel up the sleeve), I’m partial to that presentation of the trick, and I’m not quite sure how this would fit in. I’ll have to defer to the opinions of others on this one.

“Three Cards Across”

For the life of me, I’ve never understood why people like this trick, but many magicians swear by it — again, Bill Malone called it one of the three strongest things he does with cards, and his version isn’t all that different from this one. Malone’s version has some advantages in that the deck seems to be out of play, and the packet travels from one group of ten to another group of ten, both of which are being sat on by spectators, but even this more basic form of it has been endorsed.

The one thing that I think is wrong with this trick’s construction is that the Three of Clubs (or whatever) is selected before the magician last touches the packet that the spectator counts out. Ideally, you don’t want them to remember that you touched it at all, but I think an added level of mystery is to have that Three chosen (rather than just named) after the spectator covers their pile of counted cards. It’s worth mentioning that Bill Malone also believes that the card needs to be selected after the packets are all counted and tucked away.

Otherwise, I do like the way that the trick is constructed. If you like it as well, I’d recommend looking into Bill Malone’s version, as well as Paul Harris’s Las Vegas Leaper, which is highly-regarded in the card magic community. Others also swear by “Zen’s Ultimate Cards Across”, which is in JG Thompson’s My Best, and which has some interesting features to it which I’ll let you discover on your own.

“Everybody’s Card” I & II

A single card apparently changes into four (version I) or three (version II) selections. The authors suggest that the major difference between I and II is that I is meant for larger audiences, and II for more intimate audiences, but one feature that I think is strikingly different between the two is the idea of the selected cards being tabled in I, but returned to the deck in II. After all, if the first selection is replaced in the deck, it only makes sense that the second spectator could have taken the same card as the first spectator, in which case pretending that magic was responsible for changing one into the other is weak. In version I, though, the spectators see the selections being placed on the table, making it seem impossible for each person to have selected the others’ card.

In any case, it’s hard to know what to think is exactly going on with these tricks. On the one hand, it would seem that actually having a single card selected change into four other selections would be the way to go, but in order for the magic to be legitimate, I think the dual-reality ploy that the authors have described doesn’t work — everybody there would need to be a witness to the change. Perhaps the playfulness in the selection procedure that the authors describe could be leveraged somehow, so that there’s something inherently interesting in a tricky character producing such an apparently compelling mystery, but it would seem to me that in order to truly get the most out watching this trick, the audience at large can’t be left out of it. That said, actually having a single card change into four selections (in a manner that everybody could verify) would be a hard sell if you were holding a deck in the hand, because even if the switches were extremely clean and/or visual, the deck itself is present as a logical source for the switched-in cards to arrive from, and as a destination for the switched-out cards to go to. Perhaps if there were a way to change a single card into three or four selections barehanded and with the deck absent, and with the final card being verified as a non-gimmicked card, we could have something a lot more magical. Or, perhaps I just don’t understand the psychology of this trick.

One thing that’s worth pointing out is that the use of the classic force makes the whole selection procedure quick and efficient — that’s one of the positive side-effects of that technique. I couldn’t imagine getting into position using a different force without a lot of histrionics.

General Thoughts on this Chapter

Good stage card tricks aren’t easy to come by, and once one shows up and is proven good, it becomes pretty much ubiquitous. Go to a bunch of stage shows that have card magic in them, and you’ll find a lot of similarities — things like Six Card Repeat, the Invisible Deck, Cardiographic, Homing Card Plus, and Tossed Out Deck are everywhere. As such, any time you can find something with a deck of cards that plays big, you’ve got to cherish it… and probably keep your mouth shut about it as well.

As such, in addition to the ones in this chapter (some of which strike me as very good), some other old-school stage tricks that you might want to look into are Cards Up The Sleeve (Erdnase has a decent-enough version, although I think John Carney’s work on it is great), a Multiple-Selection-Revelation trick (which will require you to determine a way to keep control of several cards, as well as determine a set order of revealing them which increases in impact), the Rising Cards (one of those great old plots that are difficult to present, I suspect, because people don’t know how to prove that you’re not working with gimmicked apparatus), and perhaps something like Malini’s Card Stab (where several cards are found via stabbing them with a knife whilst the magician is blindfolded). Card to Ceiling is also worth checking out if you’ve got control over the venue. If you don’t mind performing something a little less epic than what’s described here, I’d also definitely recommend looking into “The Changing Card” from the Top Change chapter. If you want to go the Mentalism route, you probably should look into Par-Optic Vision (described in Annemann’s Practical Mental Magic), Richard Osterlind’s Radar Deck, and perhaps some of the various “Card Calling” routines out there (I personally like Bob Cassidy’s). Of course, this is just from my own research — I have no doubt that there are dozens (if not hundreds) of great ones that I’ve missed.

Ok… Next are the two chapters on flourishes.