Dustings #67
/Some readers have tested out the False Decoy Ploy mentioned in last Friday’s post. The idea was submitted by D@n Ruse (Can you solve the devious puzzle of what his real name is? The @ sign is there so a google search for him won’t direct non-magicians to this site).
Basically, the idea was this… If you casually ask someone to select a card from a spread that looks like this…
They will likely ignore the “obvious” choice—the one sticking right out at them. But while being preoccupied with avoiding that choice, they would end up taking the “easy” choice (the one marked “decoy” above). You can get more detail on this in last Friday’s post.
Here is some of the feedback I got from people who tested it…
10 different people . 6 picked the decoy. 3 picked the obvious card. 1 picked a random card. —DH
✿✿✿
I've been a hobbyist card magician for well over 50 years, and didn't particularly expect this to work. but I tried it out on my wife, whom I've been with for the last 30 years (so you can imagine how many card tricks she's seen and criticized) and she immediately took the decoy.
More time will tell, but this may be better than I thought it would be. —DE
✿✿✿
I tried the force several times, it didn't work at all. They never went for the out jogged card, as was planned, but they never went for the easy to get card either.
I don't really like how it feels. Each time I did it, they looked at the deck like, "What the heck is that? Are you trying to get me to do something specific?" Even though their choice was free, it definitely didn't feel like a free choice. —JB
Overall, from the people I heard back from, this seemed to work about 60% of the time. Just enough to be interesting, but not enough to really be useful.
I think the success of this would likely depend on who you’re performing for. If i had a wife who had seen 100s of card tricks, I can imagine this working well on her. But I’ve spent so much time with the people i regularly perform for trying to beat into their head that the card they choose is important. So I can’t really use something that relies on such a casual selection process. When I give people a static fan of cards like this to pick a card, they will frequently dig in with two hands to spread the cards to one particular random card hidden within the spread. After years of working on forces where the selection process is slow and deliberate, that’s what the people I perform for are used to.
That being said, there still may be other uses for this idea. Perhaps even unrelated to cards. Other situations where we can distract people with an “obvious” choice in a way that they don’t realize they’re taking the “easy” choice.
I mentioned in last Friday’s post that this was going to be a sort of meta-testing. A testing of testing, i.e., how many people who read the article would go and test out the idea? Well… not many. I would say that somewhere between .2 and .5% of the people who read that post ended up testing it out and reporting back. So the idea of creating some kind of testing squad for widespread testing is probably not going to happen. That’s okay. When I started the site I was pretty intent on never shifting the burden of content to the readers: no comments, no guest posts, etc. So I’m perfectly happy to handle the testing ideas aspect of the site as much as possible by myself.
My favorite part of putting the books together is working with our friend Stasia on the cover.
The title for the illustration on this year’s cover is “The Entertainer.” On the front cover is a magician performing the cups and balls from, and the back cover shows him from behind. The image was based on the Magician card from Stasia’s tarot deck.
Here’s a variation on Wednesday’s trick, Just For You. That trick involved using a switching box to switch a bunch of slips of paper with words written by the audience for duplicate words, and then exposing that all the words were the same in order to tell a story where everyone in the audience was working together to fool one person. And doing so in a way to get everyone in the audience to imagine themselves as that one person.
Here’s a similar idea. Again, this is something for parlor/stage, so it’s not something I’ve been able to test out.
You have everyone in the audience write a word on a slip of paper and drop it into some sort of container. Someone shakes up the container and dumps the folded slips of paper out onto the floor or table. One paper is randomly selected in some manner and it matches your prediction. Let’s say the word was “button.”
You would then go on to explain how this trick was accomplished.
As the people filed into the theater for the show, there was a video playing on a screen. You bring up that video again and slow it down and show a number of references to the word “button” that pop up in subtle and/or subliminal ways throughout the video.
You explain that it goes deeper than this. You didn’t simply suggest the idea of button to them. You implanted a complicated hypnotic suggestion in the video that would have them all write “button” when the time came, but it would feel to them like they were writing some other random word. “You’d even see that random word when you looked at your paper.”
You ask a couple people what word they wrote down.
“Dinosaur,” “moon,” “anger,” they say.
“Perfect. I’m glad it felt that way. Now that the hypnotic suggestion has passed, you can see the reality of the situation.”
You pick up some of the slips of paper and unfold them: button… button… button. In different handwritings.
You probably want to have one focal member of the audience who writes down their word in some other format or who doesn’t drop their word in the container, so you can highlight what’s happening with this one person (and apparently everyone else in the audience).
For example, they write their word on a small chalkboard. They think they wrote down “lemon” but when they show their word it says “button” (using some kind of Spirit Slate). Or they write it down on a drawing app. They look and see they definitely wrote down “lemon.” They show the phone to the audience and it says “button.” You break the hypnotic suggestion and now they see button too (using the Jerx App). Or some other switch of whatever they wrote down for something with “button” written on it (switching envelope, switching wallet, or just a billet switch). Tell that person to write their word in “capital letters” because it’s going to be shown to everyone in the audience—that way the switched in word will match their writing to some extent. (Or you could go so far as to research one audience’s member’s handwriting so your switched-in word really matches their normal handwriting.)
Either way, you really need to do the effect both ways: en masse for the whole audience, and then more directly for one person. Otherwise it’s too easy for the whole premise to unravel if they just think, “Well, he must have somehow switched all the slips of paper.” That thought will come to a certain percentage of the audience no matter what. But what you want is for them to think, “Maybe he switched all the papers? But wait… that doesn’t explain the woman who wrote her word on the chalkboard.”