Going Deep
/The Anything Deck, by Paul Harris, is an effect he has been working on for decades. The original description of the effect, from his Art of Astonishment series, goes like this:
For reasons unknown you remove a secret packet of cards from your wallet and secure them under the card case. You then get a seeker to dig deep into her soul and come up with a personal, meaningful magic word. Let’s say her magic word is “ROSE.” You use “ROSE” to help you locate a selected card, then reveal that the name of the card is also written on the card case. You’re a mighty fine card guesser. But what about the secret packet? You SLOWLY, CLEANLY AND OPENLY spread the packet to display large bold letters inked onto the back of the cards…spelling out a single word: ROSE.
Basically, you’re using the deck as an index of letters, and you’re sneaking out the letters (cards) you need and then swapping that packet for the packet of cards you displayed at the start.
Paul has released a number of variations on this trick over the years, with the focus primarily being on creating a separation between the initial packet of cards and the deck you use during the preliminary portion of the effect.
That preliminary part of the trick has always been the big issue with the Anything Deck/Deep Astonishment tricks. If your trick is “this packet of cards has your thought of word on the back,” then it would make much more sense to remove a packet, have them name a word, and then spread the cards to show them. Of course, that’s not very doable. So you’ve pretty much been stuck with that first phase, which is relatively weak, and involves looking at the back of the cards.
Paul has a new version of the effect out called Deep X.
In this version, that first phase is handled in a kind of interesting way. I don’t believe a full performance has been released yet, but here’s my understanding of how it goes. You show a small ID wallet with some cards in it. The spectator thinks of a 4-letter word. They plug their thought of word into a website and the website gives them their “lucky cards” based on that word (?). You go through a deck of cards and find those cards. Then you show that the cards in your ID wallet match the cards the website gave them. And finally you show that on the back of the cards in your wallet are the letters that make the word the spectator thought of.
You know, I’m not certain how I feel about that approach. I think I’d have to try it out to see how it goes over with people. My initial instinct is that it feels like a mistake to have a presentation that suggests: “This specific card relates to this letter.” And then you start going through the deck and finding those cards. That seems weirdly close to the method itself. But I’m willing to give it a shot and see how it goes.
I’ll definitely be purchasing this. I have been using the last version of this effect called Deep Clear and killing with it.
My presentation/handling for Deep Clear is pretty much perfect for casual situations as far as I’m concerned. And I’ve heard very positive things from a number of other people as well. For example, Madison Hagler wrote me about it a few years ago:
“I absolutely LOVE your handling and presentation for deep clear. Gave it the wife test and it fried her hard. The time delay the explanation gives you makes it virtually impossible to back track.”
I’ll include a pdf with my handling (taken from an old newsletter) at the end of this post, but I’ll mention the benefits of my version first…
The first phase feels both more necessary and also more removed from the second phase.
The fact that the first phase isn’t a very good trick is a feature of the presentation, rather than just being a not-great trick that’s arbitrarily tacked on to a good one
The rationale of why they’re picking a word is fleshed out in a more interesting way.
There is better misdirection (both physical misdirection and time misdirection) for the load move.
You never have to look at the back of the cards.
That last factor was always one of the primary weaknesses of the Anything Deck/Deep Astonishment methodology. Perhaps it flew by most laymen, but I’m sure there were some who correlated the part of the trick where you’re looking at the backs of cards with the finale. Regardless, in my write-up I offer something called The Alphabet Stack. A random-looking stack of 26 cards that you can associate with the letters of the alphabet with just a couple of minutes familiarizing yourself with the stack. You don’t even have to learn the whole thing if you don’t want to. Many of the card/letter combos are very obvious and as long as you know where those are you can figure out any other ones as well just by reciting the alphabet in your head.
Here is the pdf. Skip the section marked “Handling” (as that will only really make sense if you have Deep Clear in your hands). I’m sure you can take the other elements of this presentation and find ways to incorporate them into Deep X or other versions of the effect.