Ye Olde Magick Blogge

Every day, people come by the olde blogge through various google searches. Some of them are interesting… magic pebble lance pierce: Lance Pierce runs a forum called the Magic Pebble. Lance himself is a great guy (if you don’t know about him) and some of the names on there are impressive. While it’s got nowhere [...]

Conclusion And there you have it. Lord, I’m tired. Digging deeper into this book in order to write up the Annotations has forced me to come to terms with some serious flaws in this book. Still, the relatively low cost of the book, combined with the fact that there are some classics of magic in [...]

Chapters 3 and 13: Flourishes As I’ve said previously, I know next to nothing about flourishing, so my commentary here is going to be pretty brief. Prepare to be underwhelmed… Chapter 3, Flourishes Introduction There’s the usual caution against overuse, etc. One thing that isn’t talked about is how they could be potentially useful in [...]

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 [...]

Chapter 19, Routines This is a fascinating topic for me, since this is one of those things that many magicians have found their own approaches to. That said, while there are a lot of potential models, they’re not exactly easy to hunt down. Later on I’m going to be listing the ones I’ve gleaned from [...]

Chapter 18: Arrangements “Arrangements” I’ve already complained at length about the lack of work in Royal Road on the full deck stack, so I’ll keep it brief: This chapter should have work on something like the Si Stebbins or Eight Kings stack in it, and it’s annoying to me that it doesn’t. Instead, most of [...]

Chapter 17: Top and Bottom Changes “The Top Change” There’s some good ideas in here, but while I think there’s merit in looking at the various choreographies out there to set up the top-change, I think it’s also worthwhile to consider the possibility that the move can be adequately covered by natural gestures, if somebody [...]

Chapter 16: The Classic Force The Classic Force Hi. My name is Andrew Musgrave. I’m a magician… and I don’t Classic Force. It’s a great technique, if you’re able to use it. Frankly, when I’m working, I’m doing one of two routines, neither of which requires any kind of forcing. If I decide I’m going [...]

Chapter 15: The Hindu Shuffle and Other Controls The Hindu Shuffle Not really anything to say about the description here. It’s fine. I guess one thing that might be of interest is to know that in Korea, where this shuffle is quite predominant, the handling of the cards is actually frequently quite violent, with a [...]

Chapter 14: The Reverses Since the real meat of this chapter is in the tricks, I’ll plow through the techniques quickly. It’s worth noting that, as with the glimpses chapter, I don’t use any of these techniques when I work, so you should take my opinions with the requisite grains of salt. “First Method” would [...]