E.D.A.S.

I’ve received a few emails asking about the first trick I’m releasing that I mentioned in Monday’s post.

There’s not too much to say at this point, but it’s going to be the first in a series that will be known as E.D.A.S.

E.D.A.S. is a combination of a couple of different ideas.

In the past, I’ve written about the Wonder Room concept. A “Wonder Room” is any type of permanent display that can lead into a performance. In Book #4 I wrote about 10 or so different types of displays you might have in your home. One of the simplest ones was a display of different decks of cards. If you have some interesting decks out on display, then perhaps someone you’re with will be drawn to one and from there you can segue into a trick. This is, perhaps, the simplest “Wonder Room” concept, it can be taken in much more interesting directions as covered in that book.

I mentioned in a previous post about a friend of mine who has every deck on display stacked in some way so someone can bring him any deck and he can immediately get into a very stack-heavy trick. While laypeople do understand the idea that a deck can be prearranged in some way, I think they’re less likely to think this randomly chosen deck is prearranged. So this is a way to take advantage of people’s belief that you probably wouldn’t go to the effort to have dozens of different decks prearranged in some way.

I had my deck display set up in this manner for a couple of years. And I would have people go grab a deck that looked interesting to them. Then, if I felt like it, I could go right into the trick that the deck was stacked for (and if not, I could go into something else).

But what I noticed was that people were rarely drawn to anything that looked like a normal deck of playing cards. So if I had 40 decks in my display, they were almost always bringing me one of the same four or five boxes that seemingly housed something more unusual than a standard deck of cards. “What are these ones?” they’d ask, and bring me over something unusual. They wanted the story behind the cards and why I had them.

For example, I love the cool mid-century aesthetic of the Fulton line of playing cards. But as much as I like them, the average layperson isn’t drawn to them asking themselves, “What’s this all about?” They know the story behind those decks already. They’re just playing cards.

Noticing the sort of decks people were drawn to, I began to consider the idea of stacking my display with only such decks.

It would be a different kind of Wonder Room deck display. Instead of a bunch of regulation decks of playing cards, each stacked for a different trick. It would be a bunch of interesting decks of cards of some atypical type. Each deck could prompt the question, “Why do you have this?” The decks wouldn’t just be set for a trick, the decks would be set for a story.

E.D.A.S - Every Deck A Story

So someone might go over to my display and pick out a deck of stock photography samples, and I could tell them the story of the subliminal influence of visual imagery that this guy demonstrated for me with these cards. And we could try it out and see just how imperceptibly they could be manipulated too.

Or they might pick up a deck of children’s flashcards and ask me why I have them. And I can tell them the story of how I first learned the basics of mind reading. And how, just like when someone is learning to read words we break it down to the fundamentals, you essentially do the same thing when learning to read thoughts. These cards are a way to practice beginner-level mind reading, do they want to give it a shot?

Or perhaps they’re drawn to a raggedy-looking nudey deck of cards. I can tell the story of finding those cards in the woods when I was a kid. And how normally I wouldn’t hang onto something like that into my adulthood. But there’s something really unusual about these cards.

The trick I’m coming out with later this year is going to be the first in the Jerx: Every Deck A Story series. Each deck is going to be something other than a standard deck of regulation playing cards. With the tricks I’ll be releasing, as well as other effects that are commercially available that fall into this category, you could have a whole array of these unusual decks. And rather than having a display of dozens of decks of cards which you use to do random tricks. You’ll have a display of dozens of different stories. And each one will allow you to pull your friend into the story by demonstrating the particular weird phenomena that’s only possible with these unusual cards.