Since the real meat of this chapter is in the tricks, I‘ll plow through the techniques quickl y. 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 require a good deal of misdirection and/or cover, or a strong off- beat, but it‘s doable. Some people have been known to do this in the Ambitious Card immediately following having the card signed, so
that you replace the selected card on top of the deck face-up, turn the two cards face-down, and then immediately head into the effect. This can make for a pretty clean switch-out, and the card signing ends up being suitable misdirection to set up the moment. ―Second Method‖ seems like it could work, but I‘m not big into it. One thing that Steve Draun warns against is ―squaring a
square deck‖ — if you‘re squaring something that doesn‘t need squaring, it‘s got the potential to look fishy. This sort of thing strikes me as having that feeling — the right hand has to cover the deck a fair bit in order to palm off, but then the deck gets rotated, so the left hand has to come all the way in to do its part. That‘s a pretty tight framing of the deck. Maybe if it‘s not in the middle of a trick, it might work… Now, if you spread out the cards immediately after the palm, and then have the right hand rotate around underneath the spread, and then feed it into place on the square up, I think you‘ve got something a little bit better — angle-sensitive, but better. ―Third Method‖ strikes me as being extremely fiddly. How do you motivate pulling out the bottom card and putting it on top of the deck only to take it off again and place it on the bottom only to turn the
deck over and pull it out again? The authors suggest that you should appear to be toying with the deck, but that‘s a pretty meandering sequence to have to find innocent-seeming patter for.
―Fourth Method‖ has been recommended in other sources, but I‘m not a fan. The sequence motivates the actions somewhat, but if the only purpose is to set up a single card reversal, that strikes me as lame. As for doing it just to set up a reversed card in the deck prior to the trick, I think there are less conspicuous ways, but if people don‘t suspect a card trick is coming up, and the conclusion of the effect doesn‘t suggest that a single reversed card was the modus operandi, it‘d probably be fine.
As for ―Reversed Location‖… Ugh. If you‘ve been studying and practicing all the methods up until this point, then you‘ve got all the tools up until this point to control a selected card without having to resort to this sort of silliness. Yes, the point about being sloppy versus being slick is well-taken, but it‘s not worth lowering yourself to this level. Now, if you‘re willing to turn it into a fun moment, you could do something like, ―And now, all I have to do is just riffle the deck like this, and one card magically turns face up.‖ Spread, look at the indifferent, and sheepishly say, ―Well, I didn‘t say it would be your card, I said one card magically turns face up…‖ Credit goes to John Carney for using this patter dodge in different ways throughout his magic. It gets laughs often enough for me. One other thing to consider is that you don‘t need to use the key undercut in order to pull this off — any key card placement technique from a shuffle works.
So yeah, not so impressed with the techniques offered to reverse a card. If you‘ve already studied the pass (particularly the Herrmann/Hofzinser mechanics) then you‘re probably ready to look into the half-pass, which is basically just a secret reversal of the bottom half of the deck (or even of a single card). It‘s taught in a variety of locations — Richard Kaufman does it capably on his On The Pass DVD, and apparently Aaron Fisher‘s Gravity Half Pass is well-liked by those who use it. I‘d probably use something like that before I used any of these if it was to reverse a card prior to the effect, and to reverse it during under high scrutiny, I‘d probably prefer to use
something from Chapter 11.
“Spellbound”
It seems like it should be a decent surprise, but it strikes me as a bit overhandled to get there, and it uses that god-awful Reversed Location. If I was goin g to do this trick, I‘d probably want to try something a bit more straightforward. For instance, have a card selected from a spread, control to top, palm, glimpse, spread the cards out again (―I didn‘t make you take any of these cards,
right?‖), and spread over the num ber of cards necessary to set up the spell, feed the palmed card so that it‘s reversed at the right point, square, proceed with the trick (including showing the top and bottom cards, if it helps the trick). On the whole, though, I think there are better spelling effects in the book, and from the looks of it, ―Double Speller‖ from Chapter 12 could be adapted for it.
“A Tipsy Trick”
One of the gems in this book, and if you‘re working through the book in order, it‘s a shame you had to wait this long to get to it, when all the necessary techniques were covered in the earliest chapters. This is the Triumph plot, and while I offered as a premise earlier that one of the weakest places to reveal a card is within the deck, this trick is a definite exception to that rule, because really, we‘re not talking about a trick where you find a single card, we‘re talking about a
class of effect where you show an impossible mastery of the entire deck.
In any case, if you like the Triumph plot, then you should definitely check out the work put out by Dai Vernon on the subject, starting with his riffle shuffle based method in Stars of Magic. For
what it‘s worth, there are so many variations on this trick that it‘s not funny — on the table, in the hands, with the aces or multiple selections, without any selections at all, hard versions, eas y versions, self-working versions, gaffed versions, versions where the specs shuffle themselves, etc. I‘m not going to tell you which to go with, but I will say this — there are some respected card workers who consider this the best version of Triumph out there.
Some extra things to think about… if you can control multiple cards, it‘s possible to finish this trick off with all the selections reversed and gathered in the center (think about it), which gives a nice side-benefit of there not being a single card-cover at the conclusion of the shuffle; there‘ve been arguments about whether or not the cards should be revealed all face-down with the
adds an extra beat to the magic) — I prefer the latter, but many respected card men prefer the former; by making a real mess of the cards during the shuffle, and then applying through the left- hand‘s fingers upwards pr essure on a bunch of the face-down cards at the bottom, and with the thumb applying downwards pressure on a bunch of the face-up cards at the top, you can help reduce the feeling of depth between them; the sequence used at the end to fix the deck isn‘t the greatest — look into Dai Vernon‘s handling of Triumph to see his approach, and then make friends with Tyler Erickson somehow to learn an improvement upon that; I‘ve got a ton of things to say against using something like ―Abracadabra‖ to signal the magic moment, but I‘ll get into my nitpicking a little later on.
In any case, a good trick. Absolutely worth learning.
“Double Reverse”
Also a good trick, with a great routine construction. On more than one occasion someone‘s offered to show me something, and they‘ve gone through the first few steps of the trick, and I only recognized when it was too late what was going on (at which point I usually curse). The routine design has great misdirection built into it. Eugene Burger has some interesting work on this trick that you might want to research, if you want to add a slightly bizarre flavour to it. If nothing else, I‘d try to get a bit more mileage out of the magic moment, perhaps by riffling the deck, and then asking the spectator to riffle it as well.
“Mentalivity”
This is sort of a weird trick for me. Lately in card magic there‘s been a resurgence in interest in the ―Card At Any Number‖ plot, and while this trick isn‘t exactly a CAAN, it strikes me that this trick could easily be altered to accommodate the plot. Now, if you‘re like me and your soul isn‘t exactly stirred by the Card At Any Number plot, then you might not think much of this idea, but it‘s (in my opinion, anyway) a decent strategy for the effect, and at least one well-known
magician (can‘t say who without exposing it) published an impromptu CAAN which was pretty similar to this one. Briefly, in CAAN, a card is selected and returned, and the deck is shuffled. That spectator (or another) then names a random number, and their selection is cleanly found at that number. The strength of this trick is, in my opinion and the opinions of others, based on the conditions surrounding the effect — and so a lot of people have gone to great lengths to improve the fairness of the effect, such letting the spectator deal, or else having a card actually named rather than selected and returned, etc. If that‘s the important thing for you, then perhaps the
strategy in Mentalivity might not fit you (since the magician has to set up the deck, and then does all the dealing), but if you can sell the basic premise (perhaps as a bet of some kind), I think this strategy on the whole is fine.
Now, there are some things I‘d want to change for myself. I‘d probably change it to a pick -a-card trick (probably by having the card selected via a spectator peek), control it to sixth from the bottom, do a half-pass on the bottom seven, and then ask the number, and immediately start
dealing, doing the deck reversal at the number named minus six. Now, you‘ve got to motivate the reversal, so I‘d probably set it up by stopping the deal a couple of times at an arbitrary number, in order to point out that they could have said this number, but they didn‘t, and turning up that card to show it as indifferent. Do this fairly a few times, and then do it at the named number (minus six) amidst the dirty business, and then deal off th e last cards to cleanly reveal their selected card. The fact that the card is only thought-of in this version is a nice touch, though, so my idea loses that aspect.
John Born recently put out a book called ―Meant To Be‖ which is a treatise on the plot. If you like the idea, you might want to check it out.
“Mountebank Miracle”
You‘ve probably gathered by now that I don‘t like tricks that feel like the y involve math. Asking a spectator to cut off a bunch of cards, remember that number of cards, and then think of another card at that number reeks of some self-working mathematical principle to me. Also, I‘m not entirely sure that the spectator would buy the fact that the magician didn‘t just flip over the card that he needed to, as opposed to it having magically reversed. To me, if you want to show the card‘s reversed, you spread the damn deck and show it‘s reversed. So, a thumb‘s down for me on this trick.
There‘s a trick by Ackerman, Harris and Emberg called ―Overkill‖ which uses a similar principle to the above, and while it‘s a highly-regarded trick, I think that the only reason the trick‘s worth doing is because of the way the climax can be sold — otherwise, it‘s just a silly bit of ―Nya nya, look, I mathematically forced a card on you!‖
General Thoughts on this Chapter
While I‘m not so keen on some of the reversal methods, two modern classics and one trick with a lot of potential isn‘t too shabby. Can‘t complain.
I should probably elaborate on the point I made earlier about how it‘s generally weak to reveal a card within a deck, only to then recommend two tricks that use this as a final revelation. The reason why they strike me as exceptions to the rule is because of this… Usually, in magic,
spectators get to see very little actual magic. Instead, they usually get an initial state, a final state, and a suggestion that ―magic‖ was the cause that got from one state to the other. As Derren
Brown pointed out, one of the things that a lot of performers fail to do is ma ke the cause of the magic the dramatic focus, when in fact it can be as interesting (or more) than some of the supposed miracles you‘re doing.
As such, it‘s not enough if the magician has a selection returned to the deck, and then does some fumbling, and then shows the card has reversed. There‘s nothing in that which is inherently interesting, there‘s no dramatization of a magical cause. Now, with Double Reverse, if you can
involve the spectator in being a part of the magic, then you‘ve got a magic moment you can really sell, which is made more legitimate by the fact that the Do As I Do premise to the trick strongly implies that there‘s no magician‘s advantage. As mentioned previ ously, Eugene Burger has some great ideas with this. With Triumph, we‘re not just having a sin gle card reversed at the center, we‘ve got a totally messed-up deck completely reorganizing itself, and that‘s another trick that can benefit from having a really solid magical moment (again, I like riffling the deck, since it has just enough plausibility mixed with just enough mystery in the implied cause for how the magic happens).
Now, when the magic is more obvious, such as in Card To Pocket or the Colour-Changing Deck or whatnot, you can probably lighten up on the dramatizations of the magic moment, but there are some tricks which are really strengthened by paying attention to this idea. One reason why I like both ―Triumph‖ and ―Double Reverse‖ is that you can get a lot of mileage not just out of the effect, but also what the effect seems to imply about the magical cause at work.
That‘s another reason why some of the other tricks in Royal Road piss me off so much — there‘s an implied cause to the magic, but the way the effect unfolds, that cause is totally undermined by the handling. You do a lot of unnecessary finagling with the deck and then show that the
selection is reversed — chances are that your method was hidden somewhere within all that finagling, rather than within the magic moment itself. You say you‘re going to read a spectator‘s mind, but then he‘s got to think of a number, and count down to that number in the deck, and then bleah bleah bleah — again, you may say it‘s mind-reading, but it certainly smells like something else. People come to a card magic show wanting to see magic done on the cards, not senseless twiddling. People come to a mind-reading show to see a performer lock eyes with a spectator and struggle to pull the thoughts out of them, not to have to follow math.