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ULockJustice Loyal user Columbus, OH 201 Posts |
This is going to read like an advertisement for Penguin Magic's Marked Maiden Back Deck, but it's not. I don't work for them, but I am now a huge fan of these cards. They saved my butt so hard.
Last night (Thursday July 6th) my new theater show Please Shuffle The Cards opened. Sort of late in the game I acquired a dozen of these decks and decided to use them as the cards of choice for this run of the show. The show is all sleight of hand with cards at a table with a camera on the table so the audience has good visibility. No effects in the show require a marked deck, but my thought was that it could help me with situation checks. The show contains a lot of difficult and fiddly sleight of hand, and if I miss anything the marks would give me an opportunity to check and fix anything if necessary. They would be a safety net for me. Boy did I ever need it. The show was cooking along, the effects were working, and the audience was having a good time. There were enough swear words coming from members of the audience that my director and I decided that we had included some quite baffling material. I moved into what we call, "The Suit Cut." The effect is that one of the people sitting at the table with me remove a suit from the deck and shuffle it up. Then as they turn over the cards they've shuffled I cut it's mate from the remaining portion of the deck in increasingly impressive ways. If they turn over the two of hearts, I cut out the two of diamonds. They follow that with the queen of hearts and I follow it up with the queen of diamonds. Without getting to deep into the method, when they turned over the first card I confidently cut my deck only to notice the mark on the back of the card I was prepared to reveal was a club. No problem, I just missed hitting that little special something because the cards were a little warped. Go again, and nothing. I ribbon spread and to my horror the stack I was planning on using is totally ********ed. I'm 3/4's of the way through the show and disaster has struck. I sighted, culled, and swiftly produced the appropriate card to some light but confused applause, and can feel the panic rising in my throat. I was royally f'd. Fortunately I realized that because of the setup of the effect, the way everything was positioned I had a good peak on the next card that I had to find in the deck before my audience member turned it over, so I was able to start putting the stack back together on the fly and find cards while legitimately shuffling the deck. I had to do the suit cut for real. Those cards allowed me to calm down, start thinking and pull my show out of a nose dive and not have to abandon the effect. I'm a convert. #MarkedMaidens4Lyfe
This is the profile of Comedian + Magician Erik Tait. A self-promoting sleight of hand artist who thinks he is the cat's meow.
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