Invisible deck

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An invisible deck is a trick deck of playing cards used by magicians, usually for mindreading purposes. They are popular among both amateurs and professionals, and can be purchased through most magic retailers.

[edit] Effect

The magician holds a deck of cards in a case. A spectator is asked to name a playing card of their choice. The magician removes the deck, face-up from its case and spreads the cards to display that one, and only one, card is face-down. It is removed by the spectator and shown to be none other than their originally thought-of card.

[edit] Presentations

In the classic presentation of this effect, the magician hands the spectator an imaginary, or 'invisible' deck, hence the trick's title. On being handed the deck, the spectator is made to mime the acts of 'removing' the cards from their case; 'shuffling' them; 'spreading' them face-up on the table; freely 'selecting' a card; 'replacing' it face-down among the other face-up cards; and 'returning' the deck to its box.

At this point, either the spectator keeps the imaginary deck while the magician removes the real deck from his pocket, or the spectator hands the imaginary deck to the magician, which suddenly becomes real in the magician's hand. The magician then asks the spectator to name the card he/she selected, removes the deck, face-up, from its box and spreads the cards to show one face-down card. The spectator removes the card to find it is the one he/she named moments earlier.

In the more comedic version of the routine, more focus will be drawn to the part of the effect where the spectator is handling the cards. Often, the magician might criticize the spectator's card-handlng abilities, or remind them to take the cards out of the case before trying to shuffle them.

A more serious routine can be performed, which focuses more on the magician's mindreading abilities and the fact that the spectator had a completely free choice of card. The magician could hand the spectator a box of cards to hold, ask them to freely think of, and concentrate on, any card in the deck, and then to name it. The spectator then hands the box back to the magician, and the trick completed as before. This presentation was adopted by David Blaine when he performed the effect on his Street Magic television special^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] Non-Gimmicked Version

The trick uses a specially-designed, gimmicked deck, which allows the magician to apparently turn over single cards simply by fanning through them^{[citation needed]}. There is also in existence a non-gimmicked version of the trick^{[citation needed]} that achieves the same effect without gimmickry but with considerably more sleight of hand.