Card Divination

Performance and Patter

Setup: Ask the spectator to shuffle a deck of cards and remove any 10 cards.

Begin: “Today I’m going to demonstrate a little piece of card magic that works with the power of numbers. Before we begin, I want you to look at these 10 cards you’ve selected and think of any number between 1 and 10. Don’t tell me what it is.”

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Magnetic cards

Nick Trost’s Subtle Card Creations Vol. 2 has a trick called the Magnetic Cards. It basically is a four ace trick that is similar to the Gemini Twins. His description of the effect: The performer and a spectator each hold a shuffled half-deck. The spectator follows the performer’s actions. They each remove a card from their half-deck. They rub it on their sleeve to “magnetize” it. Then, they replace it face up into their respective half’-decks. Each half-deck is spread to show that each “magnetic” card has attracted two aces.

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Spectator cuts the aces

This is one of the classic card magic plots. There are a lot of variations to it, the Conjuring Archive lists over 100 entries when searching for the title. The basic plot is the spectator is invited to cut the deck, and—through a cleverly designed plot—the aces end up being revealed at the cut. One of the earliest versions was published in The Royal Road to Card Magic, titled “Poker Player’s Picnic.” This version sets the template for many of the ones that followed, namely having the deck cut into four piles on the table.

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Faro coincidence

Boy the world has changed! When I was young if you wanted to learn magic you had to hang out at a magic store. A real brick and mortar building. To get to the real good stuff you had to make friends with the magician behind the counter and prove your worth. If you were lucky they might show you something more than “Scotch and Soda”. They might recommend a really good hardback book on magic, but those books weren’t cheap. You had to pay your dues, so to speak.

Today you have the Internet. The brick and mortar stores are almost completely gone. I miss them.

Anyway, while I was surfing the web I found this self-working coincidence trick that looked interesting. Now like a lot of these tricks on the Internet, this one had several “kickers” to the coincidence effect. Go ahead and take a moment to look at it. It is at https://youtu.be/9KhQrR5uqN8?si=2rnxeBWteVBaXC7m .

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