Normally I don’t try to keep up with current affairs because I like to sit on a topic and let it stew in my brain until it ferments and froths over, generating a stink I can’t contain and have to smear on the internet for everyone to see.
But this… this just… I can’t even.
Right now you can buy the World’s Greatest Card Trick for £435.
Before you go any further, I want you to think: Sky’s the limit, what would be the world’s greatest card trick? The greatest. The absolute best.
Of course everyone’s answer will be different. Did your card appear inside something? Did it levitate? Did it go through a window? Was it signed? Damaged and restored?
Or
Did you have a card picked, put it somewhere no one can see the face, then ask someone to video call a friend on their mobile, ask them to name a card, go through the deck to see if it’s in the pack, announce that it isn’t, then take the phone walk back to the card, pick it up and show it first to the phone camera and then to everyone else.
Is that it, is that the best card trick ever?
Well you can buy that for £435¹ right now. Amazing right? No gimmicks, no difficult sleights, just clever handling and it fooled Penn and Teller². The trailer announces that it’s not hard to learn but it’s so powerful that the creator wanted to keep it exclusive to people who would really appreciate it – working professionals.
Maybe it’s just me, but the people I know who are willing to blow £435 on a card trick are not working professionals. The working professionals I know are having quite a hard time financially right now. The people I know who have that much spending money for an exclusive high price trick are amateur hobbyists who work in the tech sector. I know a man with 3 original Dean’s Boxes and a preposterously expensive animatronic parrot for stage shows which he’s never used professionally⁴. He does however get paid an exorbitant amount to take other tech sector managers to Oktoberfest.
If you make something exclusive through pricing, you’re making it exclusive to rich people. End of.
To me, this felt like the kind of thing that would hit the Murphy’s Vault for £12, and if it were a mere download, I’m sure other people would say the same. But there’s one other interesting aspect of this trick to make it worth the price tag.
It’s not a download, it’s not a booklet, it’s not a DVD. When you buy this trick, the creator of the trick will teach it to you personally over a live video call. He says he will teach you until you have the routine and moves down, with no upper limit. This is a dangerous gambit really because what if some clueless rich guy buys it and he spends the rest of his career having nightly hour long sessions teaching some poor sap the moves. From this fact alone you can glean the fact that this trick isn’t going to have any diagonal palm shifts, memorised stacks, clean forces, complex switches or deceptive steals.
All of these aspects point to it being a fairly clever but actually quite mundane card trick, were it not for the fact that it fooled Penn and Teller. I know my last post specifically mentioned how hard it is to talk about a trick in any detail when you don’t know the method, but in this case I think anyone who can’t see at least the basics of the method and what’s going on here is kidding themselves.
Maybe one day I’ll outline my overarching theory on how to figure out the method for a magic trick, but if I do it now it’ll seem a bit vindictive, give away a marketed trick and maybe rob some guy of a few £435 purchases. Up until this point no one who reads my blog was going to buy this trick anyway but if I drill down any further into even mentioning the obvious part of the handling Penn and Teller missed it may go viral and that’s not why I want to get famous.
Anyway that’s not the point of this anyway. It’s about time to take a tangent.
NFTs and the games which implemented them are now dead.
Several huge games companies have invested vast amounts of money into connecting their in game assets to a distributed write only ledger on the block chain. The cost of doing this meant the game assets were valued at hundreds of dollars, but this is okay because players could sell them to each other. Even rent them to each other in some proposed games. Would you play a game where you had to rent your sword with real money? Where another player could profit in crypto currency from your experience grinding? Capitalism’s ugly head always whispers in honey-like tones about the pleasures of being a landlord, but never contemplates the horrors of being a tenant. Fortunately people saw through this gossamer thin gloss to the scam beneath and outright rejected it. End of story.
Hey you know what would be worse? Having to pay real money to open every chest you find in a dungeon, and most of the contents are worthless. That would be wild. No one would buy that game. Except that thousands of people bought that game. So many people bought that game that you don’t even known what game I’m talking about because the Random Loot Box idea was so profitable that almost every triple A³ studio now puts them into their games, with no real consideration of whether it makes the games more fun or not. I would argue it makes them worse because it puts a theoretically infinite price tag on a game. The comedian Dara O Brien once said that he felt cheated when games locked their best content behind high difficulty modes, because he was locked out of something he had paid for. Imagine now a game where the game you bought because of things you saw in the trailer only give you those things if you gamble and lose lot of money to get them.
Why did things get this way? Because one company tried it and it worked.
I very much hope that this £435, actually fuck it lets go all in.
I very much hope that this FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR card trick does not work. I hope it is not successful and it does not make money because right now a lot of people are watching to see what happens if you take a one trick download and teach it live for fifty times the price.
Imagine one of these fucking things coming out every year. Every month. Every week.
Eugh.
In closing, if you want to keep a trick exclusive to working professionals, submit it to a magazine with no pictures. Only the pros will bother to read it.
¹ Technically £435.90 because it’s $499.95 in American dollars, and this is what happens if you have a global economy but no universal single currency. It’s a shame really because if I was American I could have announced with gusto that The World’s Greatest Card Trick is FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS.
² I’ve already talked about the questionable validity of fooling Penn and Teller before, but in this case it felt like they let something rather simple slip. Did they know their inability to guess what I think is a pretty obvious method would be used to market a five hundred dollar card trick?
³ Triple A is a phrase used to denote high budget companies delivering £50 (or higher) games with advanced graphics, large game worlds, complex stories, the whole kaboodle.
⁴ This article originally stated that he had never had a paid gig but it didn’t sit right with me as I’m not his account, how the fuck would I know? So I asked him and he has had a few paid gigs, in fact he earned enough one year to become a member of Equity. That parrot has mostly just been keeping him company through lockdown though, and 2 of those deans boxes have never come out of their packaging. He actually has a 4th since the death of Dean Dill led to the rights being bought by another manufacturer and apparently the new boxes are even better. I bet he can’t wait to use it.
My point was that he’s not what you’d call a full time working pro magician. Heck, I had a couple of paid gigs back before my heart condition worsened and I’ve got one of those ring-a-ding gumball machines that only ever comes out when I’m doing a bit for the club. Meanwhile I know 3 full time pros who wish they had one so they could use it every week – but they can’t afford it.