I attempted to make a conditional rough smooth deck today. The effect would be like a mirage deck only you would be able fan it one way to show all cards the same and then fan it the other direction to show all cards different. Both times you would be able to show the back and front of the deck and it would look fine. While I can think of easier ways to accomplish this (gaffed cards) the uses for this type of smoothing would be great. Anyone have any ideas? I don't want to reveal too much here so I'm not going to say what I did but needless to say it only partially worked and still needs some tooling. Pm me and I'll tell you what I did that way.

Sounds like the Super R & S Principle invented by Will Deceive in the early 50s. We have the rights to an effect using this principle http://www.jayleslie.com/mov/amazo.mov although others can find more different uses, as they please. A Mirage type deck that changes on orientation sounds interesting.

I'm wondering if this is anything like the half-rough idea that's been kicking around the back of my mind....

Harry Anderson's great effect The Rough-Readers uses Super Roughing. He published it in M.U.M. a while back. Joe Berg and Al Aldini discuss Super Roughing in their booklet Rough Stuff including a triple roughing method (top, middle, and bottom), but I think when it gets that complicated you should fall back on the axiom, "Just because you can, doesn't necessarily mean you should!"

I can imagine roughing half a card, then roughing the other half on the flip side. It seems pretty straight-forward (which usually isn't), but the real trick might be in choosing how to divide the halves; straight across, corner to corner, something in between?