Add to Cart: The Mind
/Add to Cart is a new series where I will recommend some things that are for sale that aren’t, strictly speaking, magic products. But which I think work well in a magic context.
Product: The Mind, card game
Use: Imp, Hook, Prop
The Mind is a cooperative card game. Meaning, everyone is on the same “team.” You win or lose as a group.
The idea is simple. There are 100 cards numbered 1-100. In each round, everyone playing gets a certain number of cards. (The number of cards you get goes up each round.)
So, imagine it’s me and you playing.
I get the numbers: 2, 4, 69 (hell yeah)
You get the numbers. 26, 50, and 88.
The goal is for us to lay down the cards we hold in sequential order. We don’t know what cards each other has and we can’t signal to each other in any way what the cards are that we have. If we go out of order, then we lose the round.
So I would obviously put down 2 very quickly, and then 4 as well. (Since it’s relatively unlikely you have the 1 or the 3. Which are the only ones that matter at this point.)
But then what happens? Well, we’d wait a little bit. I know I have 69. I would guess you have at least one card below that, so I’m going to wait for you to play a card. You know the first card you’d play is a 26, but you’re going to wait at least a bit, because maybe my final card is somewhere between 5 and 25.
After a bit of waiting you’ll probably figure my card is something higher and you’ll play the 25. And then the next period of waiting begins. Since neither of us have a number that comes super close after 25, there’s going to be another feeling out period.
The idea is that you’re building a “group mind” between yourself and the participant(s). What you’re really doing is learning each other’s timing.
It’s a surprisingly fun game. There’s a real sense of accomplishment and camaraderie when you complete a round.
And, of course, it’s a perfect lead-in for any effect with a presentation that relies on a melding of the minds. This isn’t an idea that you’re shoe-horning into the game. That’s literally what the game is about: connecting people’s thoughts.
As an Imp: You can say the game is sort of a fast-track way to get you and the people you’re with on the same page, mentally. You could even suggest that’s what it was created for originally. You don’t need to play the full game (although you could. Just a single round with a few cards each can be enough of a warm-up that allows you to go into some kind of mind-reading presentation.
As a Hook: In this case, the game wouldn’t be seen as a prerequisite for whatever demonstration you have planned. But it would just be a natural progression from talking about the “group mind” to your premise. “Actually, there’s something sort of similar I’ve been wanting to try out.”
As a Prop: These are cards with one and two digit numbers on them. After playing the game you could say, “These cards would be good for something else I want to try.” And, of course, from there you could force an individual card or group of cards for any effect you have that uses “random” numbers.
Consider this… the deck has been handled and shuffled over and over by everyone involved. When you’re done playing you have someone cut the deck in two (it’s 100 cards, so it’s rather large). Set either half aside. (“Whichever half you choose to set aside is completely out of play.”) Then have them touch any five cards in the remaining half and go into your trick.
All the shuffling. The free choice of which half to use and which to discard. And the free choice of which cards to touch, make this virtually impossible for them to believe you could know the cards in play. But really all you have to do is hold out those five cards throughout the course of the game. Then add them to the bottom of the other half while they set aside the cards that are out of play. Then use a four-for-four switch to switch them for the touched cards (e.g. the move Sankey refers to as the Vernon Substitute Transfer on many of his projects, the Vernon Stripout Addition, Derek Dingle’s No-Lap Switch, among others.) I wouldn’t just “predict” this group of cards straight-up (you could, I guess). But really it’s just an ultra-fair method to have a certain amount of “random” numbers with which to do any trick you want.
The Mind is available for like 12 bucks on Amazon. Thanks to Clement L. for bringing it to my attention.