wild card – MagicShow.Tips

Will Goldston Magic Books…

It’s been an exciting couple of days for books! A couple of weeks ago I won a stack of Will Goldston books from an auction house in Florida.

Will’s books are interesting as I’m not sure who they are written for. The descriptions of how things work are very brief almost like they’re written for a general non magician audience, however the tricks aren’t things that an amateur magician could really make without a well equipped wood and metal workshop. Also without knowledge of the props and magic in general, you really couldn’t make them based on the descriptions in the books.

I did find a little surprise inside one of the books:

The Sensational Tales of Mystery Men is signed by Peter Kane! Peter is essentially the person that created Wild Card and the card trick The Elongated Lady. I’ve got a couple emails out to some people who may know if that signature belongs to that Peter Kane or a different person with the same name.

I love finding little surprises in old books!

-Louie

More Wild Card…

Yesterday I wrote about working on a trick by removing what you don’t like about it. The specific trick I was writing about is Wild Card. I came up with three things I didn’t like, and there were easy fixed for the first two, but he third was more or a challenge.

For the routine, I was thinking you’d take six cards out of a deck. Then a card would be selected and when rubbed on the six cards they change into the selected card. For the finale, you rub the selected card on the rest of the deck and all of the cards change into the selected card.

I’m not sure if that’s been done before, but it’s a decent flow of the routine. It changes it from a packet trick and into a full deck card trick.

The pain will be to build a deck that’s all the same card and to make the needed gaffed cards.

Wild Card…

One of the ways to create new methods or routines for magic tricks is to take an existing trick and remove what you don’t like about it. We’ll start with a trick that I don’t like, and that’s Peter Kane’s Wild Card. There’s a lot I don’t like, it mostly is how redundant the trick is, and it lacks an ending. It goes, and the ending is all the cards have changed to the same card, but there’s not punctuation on it.

In Jon Racherbaumer‘s book, The Wild Card Kit, there are a couple of interesting premises. More importantly there are a couple of interesting moves and sequences that take the trick past it’s most basic level.

One notable exception is Eric DeCamp’s version of Wild Card called Jokers are Wild Are Wild. In this version the cards values end up being a blackjack hand and for a finish the cards turn into money. This puts a theme on the trick and a finish that punctuates the routine.

So…what am I going to bring Wild Card?

I’m not sure.

What I don’t like about wild card is:

How redundant the sequence is
How it uses a packet of all the same card
How it doesn’t have an ending

The first two things I don’t like are an easy fix, however the third one will take some work. For the first two, I’ll vary the moves a little bit and for the second I can make a packet of the gimmicks that use different cards, not all the same values. However an ending that makes sense might be harder…