Last night I watched a lecture from Joshua Jay live at the Magic Circle Theatre.
I was told afterwards that Session attndees were told that they could get a free pass to see Joshua’s magic circle lecture, which seems odd because he apparently gave the same lecture at the Session anyway.
But this isn’t about that. This is about The Particle System.
The Particle System is Joshua Jays new stacked deck. Having watched the lecture I have to say, if I was going to learn a stack, I would probably learn this one. Let me give a few reasons.
- Sequence aids memorisation
- some inbuilt tricks work with no memory work
- Faros into new deck order
But I’m not going to learn this stack. Or any stack. I know you can achieve miracles with it and I feel like I have what it takes to memorise a stack. I even learned a partial stack once because it was a fast algorithmic stack¹ taught at a lecture but I never used it, just like I’ve never used any stack, memorised or not.
I only really realised the reason last night as I watched the lecture. I simply lack the discipline; not to memorize the sequence, but to keep the deck in order.
Joshua Jay taught some very nice looking false shuffles and cuts to apparently mix the deck without losing the stack and I know a few others, so thats not the issue.
The issue is that if you only carry one deck, and its in a stack, you can only perform stack maintaining effects. You can never bury a card, let the spectator casually handle the deck, have a card signed, folded, torn.
I kind of have a vague disdain for card magic, partly because spectators find it hard to really tell the difference between most card tricks that happen in a regular deck² but also because I feel like there’s so much knowledge about card tricks in the public sphere. Some techniques are so embedded in the public consciousness that they have become well known phrases, such as “Double dealing”, “Ace up your sleeve”, “Your card is marked”, and indeed, “The deck is stacked”. This is no failure on the part of magicians, rather the fact that theres such a huge technical overlap between magic and gambling cheats. It’s no different to “The dice are loaded” or “The house always wins”. Even if you don’t use a stacked deck, a marked deck, double deals or sleeved cards, people have a wide range of methodological ideas which are frontloaded when they watch card magic. I can’t think of any other form of magic which suffers from that.
The combination of these two facets mean that to the average lay person there’s no real difference between a hands off card at any number and an invisible deck. A well choreographed stacked gambling demonstration ending with all cards in new deck order is basically Sam the Bellhop with fewer jokes.
The card routines I regularly perform are Bizarre Twist³, Paperclipped, Torn and Restored⁴ and Card Warp, all of which reduce the focus of interest down to a single card, at which point it is simply an individual object, rather than part of a deck in a card routine. My deck, as such, looks incomplete and tatty because it’s missing a few cards. It doesn’t matter because a deck of only 43 cards might make it probabilistically less impressive to find or name a chosen card, but it doesn’t affect the odds of their signed card actually being folded up out on display since the start of the routine, nor does it make a card more likely to change its back design or transform in topologically nonsensical ways.
Yes, technically if I planned ahead I could add a card to a stacked deck and force that card for my various shenanigans but then casual moves like top changing to bury an indifferent card have to be instead carefully managed to maintain the stack at every turn.
I just can’t live like that.
¹ Prism by Wayne Goodman if you must know. One way algorithmic half stack. Lets you name the card at any even number (there’s a linguistic workaround for odd numbers).
² That is not to say the average spectator can really tell the difference if the deck is marked or stripped or svengalied. These still should all appear regular. In this context an irregular deck would be all the cards are blank, or the backs all change colour or the deck turns into a solid block. Maybe all those themed decks Craig Petty and Chris Rawlins are turning out might seem different too but I always worry that the people who watch those tricks come away thinking less about the magic and more about where they can get a set of Lego Top Trumps or Scrabble The Card Game.
³ I do bizarre twist a little differently to most people, maybe one day I’ll publish the details of how. What’s important however is that I eschew the usual “Whole deck changes” ending for having their card be the one that changed, because I will then use that one magical card for the next couple of effects, cementing it as a magical object when it gets left behind.
⁴ I do JC Wagner’s, with s few extra subtleties on the restore. Yes I know its only a ¾ restore, I prefer that to a complete restore. Don’t @ me.