A buddy of mine sent me a link to the trailer for the magic trick Summit by The Other Brothers and Patrick Kun. He also sent me a link PropDog’s version of the same trailer that’s “fact checking” the claims made in the original trailer. Watch the first trailer and tell me if you can figure out who the trick works based on what they say:
Based on the first trailer if the claims where 100% true, it’s be impossible…as a real world, workable, sellable magic trick. That had me want to come up with a real world method…and I basically came up with the method used in Abstract Effect’s Summit.
What I came up with was limiting the choice of card. I used Ben Harris’s Silent Running principle which would limit their choice of card to one of eight cards…which is better than the 12 cards you limit them to in this trick. And there’s not magician’s choice with the Silent Running principle. I’d have an index of seven of those cards, the eighth card would already be in the pen.
For loading the card (if needed) I would use a method I used in a bill to cigarette I did 20 years ago. Basically you just push the card down into the pen while you pretend to pull out the palmed card from the pen.
OK, so I have a method, now let’s watch the PropDog video that fact checks the original trailer:
Well…I basically came up with the same method. The only differences are we are using different methods to limit the choice and I think they are reducing they number of cards in the index by having them double ended. Double ended cards wouldn’t work well with what I’m to limit the choice, but the trade off is the card could be unrolled by the spectator.
Here’s the thing, if a trick seems impossible…guess what 95% of the time it probably is and the trailer for the magic trick is misleading. I get that some trailers need to not show something, like Dean Dill’s Blizzard. That said The Other Brothers seem to be stretching the truth and playing with words a lot in the ad.