51 Cases South

Here is a theoretical idea for a parlor or stage routine. I don’t know if it’s any good, but I think it’s kind of interesting and there are a couple moments in the piece that I like.

The magician says, “One time I saw this guy perform a trick. He had a deck of cards. He told me to name any card in the deck. I named the 5 of Hearts. Very slowly, without doing anything sneaky, he slid the deck from the card case, spread the cards between his hands, and there was one card reversed in the deck. It was the 5 of Hearts.

“Do you want to know how he did it? Well, the truth is, I don’t know. And the reason I don’t isn’t because I can’t think of a way it can be done. It’s because I know of so many ways it could be done that I don’t know which method he used.

“One thing people don’t understand about magicians is how much they’re specialists. There are performers who can make things appear. There are performers who can make objects change color. There are performers who can make things float. Some can do all these things. But not many. It’s like playing an instrument. There are some guys who can play a lot of instruments well. But usually if you play a bunch of instruments you’re really only particularly good at one and just okay at the others. Magic is like that too. Most everyone has their speciality.

“So if you want to do the trick where the one card the person names is found reversed in the deck, you’re going to use the method that’s in line with your specialty. Some guys know what people will say, so they just reverse the card they know will be named. Some guys can make you say something without you knowing it. So they just reverse any random card and make sure that’s the one you name. Some guys don’t know what you’ll say, and they can’t make you say anything, but they can make things appear. So they just wait for you to name a card and then make it appear face-up in the deck. Other performers can change an object’s orientation, so for them it’s simply a matter of magically reversing the card. And still others can cloud people’s minds. They’ll tell you that your card is reversed in the deck, and you’ll swear you see that it is, but it’s not really there.

“Tonight I’ll show you how I would do the trick.”

The curtain behind the performer opens and there is a sawhorse on either end of the stage with a piece of wood resting across the two. The wood is just a few inches in width, but it extends across the entire stage. The wood is acting as a shelf that is about hip height to the performer. On top of the “shelf” are 52 decks of cards in their cases, standing on their bottom edge.

The performer has a few members of the audience work together to name a card. They come up with the 3 of Diamonds.

“The 3 of Diamonds? Okay, okay.”

The magician steps back so he’s standing behind the shelf of cards that goes all the way across the stage.

“3 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds, 3 of Diamonds,” he mumbles as he slowly walks down the row of decks. “It should be here, I think.” He picks up one of the cases. Opens it up and thumbs through the cards a bit. “Nope, one off,” he says. And puts that case back down.

He takes the next case in the row and removes the deck of cards from it.

“Look. Pay close attention. All I do is spread this deck, very cleanly. And… miraculously… the one card you named is the one card that’s reversed in this deck.”

The magician spreads to one reversed card. He pulls it out, and it’s the 3 of Diamonds. The audience is unimpressed.

“When I said I could make your freely named card be the one card that was reversed in the deck, you probably didn’t imagine me having 51 other decks in play. That is a little underwhelming, I suppose. As you probably guessed, there is a different card reversed in each of these decks.”

The magician puts the deck of cards back in its case and replaces the case on the shelf where it was originally.

He then walks over to one edge of the shelf, still standing behind it.

“It’s not impressive when you see it like that. But that’s the method I need to use. I’m not good at making things appear. And I’m not good at making predictions.

“What I am… is a vanisher.”

The magician removes a magic wand from his inside coat pocket and begins to walk behind the row of decks. He makes a tapping motion above the cards on the near end of of the row. “Bippity,” he says, and continues walking. When he gets to the middle of the row he makes another tapping motion with the wand. “Boppity,” he says. As he gets to the far end of the row he makes a final tapping motion above the cards on that end. “Boo,” he says.

Then he flicks his wrist of the hand holding the wand and the “wand” unfolds. It’s actually a black folding fan with white tips.

The magician once agains walks behind the shelf. This time he holds the fan at hip height and flutters it in short, rapid movements at the decks. As he walks, the breeze from the fan causes the card cases to fall off the plank of wood, tumbling to the floor where they clatter emptily, following the magicians path across the stage. When he reaches the other side, only one case is still standing, the one from which he had spread to the named card earlier.

Method

Well, you know, it’s just an invisible deck and a bunch of empty cases, of course.

The trick was inspired by some emails from Joe Mckay in which he suggested a few different sucker tricks using an invisible deck and a number of empty card cases where the spectators would assume you had access to a bunch of decks in order to do your trick, but then you reveal that all the cases are empty. (The original idea here seems to belong to Dr. Sawa. Although similar concepts have been explored by a few other magicians, including Asi Wind on his Fool Us appearance.)

What I wanted to do was remove the “sucker trick” element of the effect. Rather than say, “Ah-ha! I fooled you. You thought all these other cases contained decks too, but they’re actually empty!” I decided to go with the idea that yes, these other cases did in fact have decks in them, but I’ve caused them to vanish. If one was ever to perform this for real, I would recommend adding a couple convincers at the start to reinforce the idea that there are 52 actual decks on stage. For example, you could “accidentally” knock one of the decks off the wooden shelf, causing its cards to spill out on the floor. In the process of gathering up the cards and returning the deck back to its original position, you would switch the cased deck for an empty one at some moment where your body is blocking the view of the audience.

I think it’s kind of an interesting effect. I like the premise, and the idea of giving them a peek behind the curtain of how different magic specialists would accomplish the same trick. I like using an Invisible Deck as the method for a vanish. And I like the fact that it sort of jerks people around with what they’re seeing. I would assume that after the decks “vanish” a good portion of the audience will come to the conclusion that those decks never were there. But if that’s true, they have to reassess the moment where the magician spread the cards to show their reversed card. This moment—that originally meant nothing—is now the moment of impossibility (if it’s true the other cases were empty all along).

My original idea was to turn on an oscillating fan behind the cases, so it would blow them all off in sequence except the one that held the Invisible Deck. But I like the folding fan idea a little better. Mainly because I like the idea of the thing they assume is an “ordinary” wand, unfolding into a handheld fan. (Which seems like a prop that should already exist, but I did some searching and couldn’t find anything.)