Presenting Coincidences, Part 2
/When was Part 1? Back in 2018. But you don’t have to re-read that post. This is a separate idea for presenting coincidence effects. This ties into some of the ACAAN discussion from earlier posts.
Coincidence can be an intriguing premise for a magic effect—but not if it's offered as the explanation for what just happened.
“You named any card. He counted the change in his pocket and it was 14 cents. Wouldn't it be a crazy coincidence if the card you named just happened to be the 14th card in the deck?”
That doesn’t land as anything more than the lowest-effort framing you could offer for the trick.
The way I prefer to present coincidence effects is by focusing on whatever it is we’re doing to generate coincidences. Some ritual. Some substance. Some technique I heard about that supposedly causes coincidences to manifest.
This can be any sort of Imp you want to create.
For simplicity, let’s say it’s an incantation. You and your friend repeat this chant, then begin actively looking for signs of coincidence.
“Think of a number between 1 and 10,” you say. You both say yours aloud—but they don’t match.
“Name a song,” you suggest, flipping on the radio. Not even close.
“Hmm. Okay. Name a card,” you say, picking up a nearby deck. “Five of Spades. Alright... let’s try this. Got any change in your pocket? How much? Fourteen cents? Okay, count to the 14th card. What?! Seriously?!”
We can’t pretend that a card appearing at the position in a deck that matches the change in someone’s pocket is somehow meaningful. It’s not. And using it as your specific demonstration of the power of coincidence would be silly.
But if it happens after a ritual intended to generate coincidences? That’s different. It doesn’t matter what the coincidence is. What matters is that there was one. That’s enough for the moment to feel charged.
They might not remember the specifics—the card or the coins. But they'll remember the old Israeli incantation you taught them. Or the weird spray bottle filled with “coincidence serum.” Or the crystal with an alleged “coincidence radius” of eight feet.
If you focus on the coincidence itself, your trick lives or dies by whether that coincidence feels relevant enough to matter. And most coincidence tricks don’t.
But if you focus on the thing that generates the coincidence, then any coincidence becomes endowed with meaning. You don’t need something profound to happen. You just need something to happen. And the audience will fill in the rest.
They get to imagine a world where serendipity can be summoned. They won’t believe that premise—but their mind will still entertain it. “How else might this thing be influencing reality?”
By contrast, if you focus solely on the coincidence, there’s nowhere to go from there. No one is charmed by a world where a bill’s serial number happens to match the cards in a bridge hand.
The coincidence doesn’t carry the effect. The generator does.
That shift in framing unlocks a whole category of effects that might otherwise feel too slight or irrelevant to perform. It lets you take the meaningless—and make it matter.