You may have heard of the idea of cancelling. And you’ve probably read about tricks with methods that cancel each other out. But how do you add cancelling to tricks you already do? How do you make it a regular part of your magic?
I believe the best way magicians can make a magic trick more powerful is to combine two or more methods. This is the basis of most of the cancelling I use.
In this article, I’ll focus on card tricks because that’s the easiest way to understand the principles involved. However, the basic idea of combining methods to cancel each other can be applied to all magic.
Cancelling the Invisible Deck
Let’s start with probably the most-performed trick of the last 75 years—the Invisible Deck. You show a deck of cards, the spectator names any card, and you very fairly spread the deck to show one card is reversed. It’s the named card!
To improve this trick, we need to cancel the method. When Eddie Fields created the Invisible Deck presentation that Don Alan made famous, he used Joe Berg’s “Ultra-Mental” rough-and-smooth gaffed deck as the method, and this is what we need to cancel.
But, and this is the first rule of canceling, don’t just cancel the method you’re using—you should also cancel the methods you aren’t using. Fortunately, this is a lot easier.
Lay audiences who see this miracle have two basic ideas. The first is sleight-of-hand—you secretly reversed the card. The second is that you have some kind of tricky deck. We need to cancel both.
The idea of Sleight of Hand is pretty well eliminated by the extreme cleanliness of the Ultra-Mental deck. But this only happens if you invite the spectators to watch closely, to make sure you don’t do any sleight of hand. If you don’t mention sleight-of-hand specifically, it won’t be cancelled.
