Perfect Fishing Trick…

Yesterday I wrote about using “fishing techniques” on streaming magic shows, you can read the post here. Today I’m going to deal with a specific trick. Let’s not forget that I think that if you are doing a trick where you are asking questions to figure out what someone is thinking of, you need to have something physical as your prediction. That makes it harder to back track and figure out the method of the trick.

Okay, let’s get to the trick. I just got mine in the mail a couple of days ago and have done it a few times already and it’s playing great. The trick is John Kennedy’s Mind Power Deck!

John Kennedy mind power deck

If you aren’t familiar with this deck, you can show it to be normal, have someone memorize a card and with asking just a few questions you can tell them the card they are thinking of. It’s great! The trick has a built in cheat sheet, but I simply printed out a flow chart and taped it to the wall behind my webcam. This is easier to read that the hidden in plain sight cheat sheet he gives you.

How I add a physical prediction to the trick is I have an envelope that I’m holding in my hand before the trick. The envelope ends up having the card they are thinking of in it. Having the card in the envelope makes it so that someone can’t say, “the magician just asked questions until he figured out the card“. Unfortunately that’s the logical solution that a non-magician would come up with and the correct one. Always add a physical prediction!

Gimmicked Envelope…

A few nights ago I woke up with a idea for a gimmicked envelope at about 3:30am. I went back to bed without writing it down. Then an hour later I woke up with the same gimmicked envelope idea “fleshed” out a bit more in terms of a routine. I went back to bed without writing it down again. I got up once more about 90 mins later with a more fully formed routine for the trick and immediately went to the office to build the gimmick!

First of all, if you wake up with an idea, you should always write it down. Most of the time if you got back to sleep, the idea is gone. I’m lucky that I work up multiple times with the idea and it wasn’t lost. Here’s the gimmicked envelope with a jumbo card inside:

I’m not sure that an envelope has been gimmicked this way before. Basically what it does is allows something to be loaded into the envelope.

What I like about this is that in the picture above you can clearly see the gimmick. It’s hidden in plain sight, and that’s what makes it interesting for me. Tomorrow I’ll kind of write up the rough routine for it.