Card Magic Tricks - Are They Relevant In Modern Magic?By dot
Are Card Tricks Relevant to Todays Modern Magic Performance?
In days gone by, people regularly entertained themselves with packs of the well-known fifty-two pasteboards. Games like Bridge, Canasta, and Gin Rummy, were known by just about anyone, and if a gathering turned dull, all it took was a single individual pulling out a deck of cards and saying “Pinochle, anyone?”
Cards and suits were familiar commodities. Metaphors in the language show this. We often use expressions like “call a spade a spade” or say that something “trumps” something else.
With the commonality of playing cards came the popularity of card magic. Now once the game was done, or if the deal came to you, the cards could be used as a demonstration of your magical powers. After all, there are fifty-two random cards, right? How could someone continually locate a named card in the deck? Amazing!
And so card tricks go on to this day. Every magic store has hundreds of books, videos, specialized decks, gaffed cards, trick cards, blank cards, mis-colored cards, and so on for the budding magician.
But how relevant are card tricks anymore?
Do people still get together on Friday nights and play Bridge, Pinochle, or the like? Are the suits still generally known by all? Or when you bring out your deck to impress an impromptu audience, do you find yourself saying, things like “the clubs are the black ones with the little knobby things?”
Then there’s the issue of card magic tricks being a little played out. When someone first learns a little magic (and usually it is just a little), he often learns a card trick. As such, the phrase “pick a card, any card” has entered the Magic Hall of Infamy and is often (as it should be) avoided by anyone truly trying to dazzle with cards.
Nonetheless, card magic can be very impressive even to those with limited knowledge of cards or games played with them. After all, how often do you see queen of hearts magically and invisibly moving across the table to be paired up with the queen of spades? As far as this goes, the magic still impresses.
So here’s how we look at card magic in this day and age:
1. Don’t assume that the audience knows anything about the deck of cards. Presume that they don’t know there are 52 cards. Presume that they don’t know the names of the suits. And presume that they don’t even know that an Ace beats everything.
2. When using cards in your routines, steer clear of game references for the most part. Emphasize (subtly) that you’ve got 52 random pieces of cardboard and that there’s no way anyone should be able to tell where any one of them is at a given time.
3. Look for tricks and effects that are heavy on routine. A good story trick (Michael Ammar’s “Cannibal Queens” comes to mind) is going to entertain your audience even if they’ve never picked up a deck of playing cards.
Are we looking at the final days of card magic tricks? It’s possible that card magic is ultimately going to be one of those art forms that insiders demonstrate amongst themselves. On the other hand, as long as magicians are able to adapt to more creative uses, it’s unlikely that the favored 52 will fade away any time soon.
How about a card trick then? Check out and enjoy this amazing online mind reader!
Article by the coolest guy ever
