Tag: svengali deck

New Magic Invention to Change All

Inside Magic Image of Ask Alexander Logo
Alexander Knows Genius When He Sees It

We are nothing if not visionary — which at times, means we are close to nothing.  But when the visionary thing hits us, it hits us hard.  Like a sap to the nugget out of the night.  We don’t know where it came from but we recognize it when we see it in a police line-up.

We were sapped in just this way last night.  We had finished our last show of the evening at the Hollywood Strip near the Spiderman and by the lady that sells some kind of meat with or without a stick (your choice).  We packed up our ventriloquist dummy (face away from the opening of the suitcase just in case) and loaded up our handful of coins to begin our walk down the Avenue of the Stars.

We thought about how people were making zillions off of cool decks of cards with unique backs.  There are cards with old-looking backs, mis-made backs, alcoholic product labeled backs, colorful wave backs to facilitate beautiful pressure fans (which we cannot do and admit so publicly so that no one confuses us for someone with talent), cat backs, dog backs, back of dog backs and others.

But — and this is where the genius comes in — no one has come up with a back that looks like the front of the deck.  It could be all backs of the same card; say, all nine-of-hearts.  Or it could be different backs of different cards like a new deck just on the back.  In essence every card would be a double-facer.  You could have cards that match the cards on the front or cards that are the opposite of the front, or cards that are random with only a few cards matching.  (Our quick back of the Kleenex(r) calculations says that you would likely have two such cards in a deck of 52 but it was a used Kleenex and we stopped calculating at a certain point for hygienic reasons).

Now, the only problem is to figure out what trick would be perfect for this trick deck of cards.

We could do a color change pretty easy, if the card on the back was a different color.  We could do a card to wallet but with two cards in the wallet to match the double-faced card selected.

We could even make a Svengali deck or Stripper pack to do things we don’t know yet.

Maybe we’ll launch this on Kickstarter and rake in the dough or keep it to our own selves and  die poor.

This could be big.

MagicWeek: Derren Brown Wins David Berglas Award

Inside Magic Image of Our Intern Missy Rochelle Holding an Original TV Magic Card Deck Reading is one of our favorite things to do.  We read constantly.  Our job (the real one where we make gobs of cash easily converted into gobs worth of magic tricks and books) is all about reading and during our breaks, we read.

We used our advance skills to learn about the goings on over in the United Kingdom.  You may be able to read this faster, it is tough for us to sound out words in a British accent and virtually impossible to focus on not  moving our lips as we work through each word plus try to derive meaning.  Duncan Trillo’s MagicWeek.co.uk web site is on our weekly must read list.  This weekend we learned the British Magical Society awarded the David Berglass Award to Inside Magic Favorite Derren Brown.

The presentation took place during Annual Awards Dinner of the BMS in Coldfield, Birmingham.

Derren Brown is currently touring with a new show “Svengali” and was therefore well-equipped to document the presentation by his own private film crew.

We will have to do some more reading to learn more about his new show, Svengali.  It sounds fascinating and is just the type of thing young magicians in this country need to see.

The Svengali Deck has fallen on tough times in the States.  Perhaps its ubiquity from the TV Magic Card campaign scorched the earth but if Derren Brown can do an entire two hour evening show with nothing more than a Svengali Deck, that’s proof that the old trick still has some life yet.

We imagine with his big budget, he can use a different deck for each show and decrease the chances of being found out by audience members who see the show more than once.

Read the full article here: MagicWeek – Magic News in the UK – Magic Shop, Magic Tricks, Magic Convention.