Hello everybody,

I've been looking for an effect since 2008 and have not been able to find it. I perform mainly stage mentalism and closeup card magic (I suffer from large-prop-ophobia). Years ago (2007) a young magician asked me to perform a small show at his nearby church. The show would be in a classroom and I had 45 minutes. Angles were less than ideal as I would have people sitting on three sides. Anyway, long story short, I began developing an act that would work and I performed what was arguably my best show ever. I came up with the idea for my closer while driving across the flyover states. The problem was, I have not been able to come up with a decent method to achieve the effect. Alas, I broke one of my personal rules of performance and resorted to stoogery. Granted, it was instant stoogery, but stoogery nonetheless. I never performed the routine since as I was never able to come up with a clean enough method. Part of the routine requires the following to happen:

A spectator's chosen card is signed across the face (doesn't matter what card) and then later the spectator's signature is on a blank face card.

Essentially I am looking for a signed card transposition. It is highly desirable that the transposition is to a blank card. Has anybody ever read of/seen/heard of such an effect? If you could point me toward some material or person that might help I would be incredibly grateful. This effect has been stewing in the back of my mind for years and I've never come up with a workable solution.

Thanks in advance.

(Also, if this is not the correct place to post this, please assist me in posting this thread in the correct venue).

That sounds amazing! The idea of signing something - having a unique symbol in live ink - is used to eliminate the possibility of a switched card, so ending up with a different card would be the holy grail. The only way I can imagine it happening is with some kind of transfer paper (carbon paper), and the spec would have to press hard enough for it to transfer onto the card underneath.

That's what happens in my recently published "Hypno-Hallucination" which is contained in the e-Book "Hypno-Trix" in Wizards' Journal #30. The premise is from Eddie Clever's 1934 "Hallucination" which was the very first trick published in the very first issue of Ted Annemann's "The Jinx." I ran a little further with the premise and I also redesigned it as a stage trick with super jumbo cards, but the essence is this: Five spectators shuffle a super jumbo (8" x 11") deck of cards, by splitting up the deck into fifths and each one shuffles a section. They can choose a card from their own shuffled section, or pick one from someone else, but they can't peek at the face-down cards - they just pull them out and seal them in an envelope sight unseen. Now one of the five spectators is chosen to select a card from the deck that remains. In Eddie Clever's version, all he could do was peek at a corner, but I let him see the entire card, and then I let him pull out the card and sign it on the back, before returning it to the deck somewhere in the middle. Now the deck is shuffled or mixed as best as a deck that size can be shuffled or mixed. The cards are shown to the first spectator again so he can verify that the card he signed is indeed still in the center of the deck. Then each of the four other spectators are allowed to view the signed card just so they can be witnesses when it is found. That's not going to be easy. After all of them have looked at the card (not peeked at a corner) they are asked to say the name of the card aloud so everyone in the audience will know what it is. The problem? They each name a different card. That is when I reveal that they were hypnotized and that they couldn't have possibly seen those five different cards they named because none of those cards is in the deck. See for yourselves. They grab the deck and look, and none of the five cards named are in the deck. I ask them to at least find the signed card. Surely that must be there. And it is, only it's not the card the first spectator thought it was, it is a Joker! (It could also be a blank card if you insist!) The reason why they can't find those five cards each spectator is CERTAIN he saw while hypnotized is because the five cards were taken out by the spectators themselves and sealed in that envelope. When the envelope is unsealed by the spectators themselves and the cards are removed, there they are. Was it all a dream, or were they all hypnotized? No transfer paper is required- the signature is done with a regular sharpie pen of any color the spectator selects, and he can keep the signed Joker as a souvenir. No "stoogery" is required, either. All five spectators are legit.

There's lots of other methods I thought of that were about as practical as transfer paper. I thought of bleed through cellophane, disappearing ink, removable pips, etc. The removable pips were probably the least likely to be detected, but coming up with a handling that allowed the removal of the pips is difficult. I was really hoping that somebody had figured this out and published it.

Sorry Jim, you beat me to the punch.

Your effect sounds very similar to "Hallucinations by Black's Magic" that I bought years ago hoping it would offer some insight into how I might achieve my desired effect. I performed it a couple times for coworkers and that was all (it suffered from corner peeks also).

I do like your kind of thinking. Is there somewhere I can find this e-book?