Svengali Deck
$20.99Beginner
← The effects
The Card Force
The spectator believes they chose a card freely. They did not: the magician decided which card they would take before they reached for the deck.
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- Performs
- Close-Up, Parlor, Stage, Walk-Around
- Type
- Prediction
What they see
The effect from the front
A force is invisible by definition. The audience sees a perfectly fair choice: the deck is riffled and they call stop, or the cards are spread and they touch one, or they cut wherever they like. They take a card, look at it, and remember it.
Nothing they saw suggests the choice was anything but free. That is the point. Every trick that follows — the prediction written an hour earlier, the card that turns up in a sealed envelope, the name the performer already knew — rests on the spectator being certain they chose.
A good force is never noticed. A bad one is the moment a whole routine falls apart, which is why magicians talk about forcing more than about almost anything else.
Provenance
Where it comes from
Forcing a card is as old as card magic itself, and the classic force — offered with a spread of cards — appears throughout nineteenth-century writing and was regarded even then as a test of skill.
Alongside sleight-of-hand forces, magicians have long used forcing decks, decks arranged or made so that the choice is controlled, and the Svengali deck is the best-known example in print. Mentalists rely on forcing more than anyone, and a large part of the mentalism literature is about forces that look like nothing at all.
Learning it
What it takes
Some forces take minutes and some take years. A forcing deck lets a complete beginner force a card on the first day; the classic sleight-of-hand force is notoriously difficult and many experienced card workers still avoid it with strangers.
The most important skill is the same for both: acting as though the choice does not matter. A performer who watches the spectator's hand too closely, or rushes them, gives away the fact that it does.
If you are starting out, begin with a forcing deck and spend the time on presentation; the prediction tricks it unlocks are some of the strongest in close-up magic.
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What you need
Props for the Card Force
Next
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The Svengali Deck
A spectator names a card, the deck is riffled to show every card different, and the named one is the only one there — the trick deck that has sold at fairgrounds for a century.