Editor’s note: Damn, that last post set a new record for reader mail in the first 24 hours! Don’t be afraid to email us; even if we enabled comments, we always appreciate emails. We’ll be featuring two in a long overdue Reader Mail followup if they agree to it. Anyway, now you should enjoy this followup from Franklin. I consider it an improvement over Drew’s already great idea (at least if you prefer to clock the whole deck), and it is a lot easier to do than most of his ideas that don’t involve app development. I might even get it down by next week, and that’s impressive for someone with my level of mental incapacity.
Drew showed you his little clock, but take a look at mine!
Following Drew sharing some rare footage (that you will never see!) of him performing the Burger clocking routine as faithfully as possible I was, of course, enticed to give it a shot myself. But I had no intention to limiting myself to one color and no court cards. Sure, it’s fast, but what if I could get fast without those limitations? I looked into the history of clocking techniques and found some interesting ideas recorded by Karl Fulves. By adapting them, within an hour I was clocking a full deck, unrestricted, in as little as 40 seconds. With steady practice, I could probably cut that down to 30.
Happy New Year guys! It’s your boy, Drew. My first post of 2026! I know, there’s been other posts by me that have come out this year. I wrote those 2-3 years ago, it’s the punk-ass bitch Editor who is only getting them out now.
I’m trying out a new writer’s voice. How do you like me now?
Okay, yeah, let’s stop that.
The creation of this post is due to young Erika Tsai at Magifest blowing my (and everyone else’s) mind with a simple card trick. Using a borrowed shuffled deck, she had someone freely take any card out of the deck. Then, she quickly searched through the deck to take out a card, the perfect mate to the freely selected card. She did this at astonishing speed! She gave no inclination of any calculation, clocking, or thinking being done. I thought it had to be lightning fast clocking. That’s right, the intricate art of assembling tiny metal gears and springs to create a symphony of machinery tha- I’m dicking you around. Clocking is the much more impressive skill of adding the values of playing cards together, to figure out which one is missing from the deck! I had a friend of mine ask her what method of clocking she was using, and what calculations she was going through in her mind. Apparently, she simply shrugged and said “I don’t do any calculations… I just look at the spread and notice what card isn’t there.”
Would be cool to be able to do that effect, right? Unless you’re a genius like Erika, you’re stuck with me, your good pal Drew. I have good news, there is an effect in the literature that is the exact same, and its easy to do. Plus, I created a very way convenient to practice this over and over again, quickly.
After reviewing many books, notes, effects, consulting magician friends, I found what I think, is the perfect version. Though similar thinking is discussed in Lorayne’s Epitome Location (I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t bust out of his grave to comment on this post to try to sell us his material), the handling I like is “an Unnamed Effect”, located in Eugene Burger’s Final Secrets, on page 125. I give it my highest recommendation! While the little Eugene Burger quirks and performance tips outlined in the book are not for me to share here, what I will say is that he only clocks red or black cards, instead of an entire deck (there exists similarity to Paul Vigil’s use of it in his effect, Diplopia). As you can imagine, clocking 26 cards instead of 52 can make the process much, much quicker. In addition to this, he only casts 10s, not 13s, ignoring all court cards (you eliminate them from being chosen in the beginning). If you’re not familiar with the jargon “cast”, it just means he only counts to 10. So now, you’re only clocking 20 cards, instead of 52. I hope that this little description has gotten you wanting to check out Eugene’s handling. The book is chock-full of fantastic method and philosophy, you won’t go wrong in getting it if you are interested in psychological card work.
A quick note, I wrote a post about how using a four of a kind is better than a singular mate. I still generally agree with what I wrote, but I think in this instance, it’s better with just the mate of the card. It’s faster and more direct. You have to thumb through all the cards to do your clocking, then again to find your mate. I think getting the rest of the four of a kind out would be too long, and would add to any time spent thumbing through the cards; time you generally aim to reduce.
Drew’s Clocking Exercise Deck™
If you’re practicing clocking only a certain color, it’s sort of tricky to randomly take out a card knowing its color, but not anything else about its identity. What I’d first do to practice is take my deck and take out the court cards (you can leave them in if you’re casting 13s) and separate the deck into red and black cards. Then I’d blindly take one card from each pile, then shuffle both piles back together. After, I’d clock for both cards. The problem with this is that it’s sort of a pain in the neck to do, especially if you want to practice over and over again. That’s why I came up with this deck!
This is a full 52 card deck. However, you’ll notice there are three types of backs scattered throughout this deck.
Cards with a red back, blue back, and then a red back with a big cross drawn on with a sharpie. What I did, was take a deck with a red back and remove all the black cards from it. Then I took all the black cards from a deck with a blue deck, and put them in in my red backed deck. So I had a deck with every card in it still, but the backs of the cards indicated what color the cards were. Then I took out all the court cards and put a big fat X on the back of them. The idea is to shuffle all of these cards together. Then, you can spread the deck facedown on the table, easily see what card is red or black, and what card is a court card so you know not to choose it (if you are only casting 10s). If I’m not casting 13 and including the court cards, why leave them in at all? I want to simulate what it would be like to clock in a real life performance as accurately as possible. Leaving the courts in the deck to spread past them serves that purpose. If you include court cards in your calculation and cast 13s, then you can just not draw an X on the back of them, simple! To do the exercise, you just take out a card, note it’s color, and then clock away! It instantly resets and couldn’t be any easier to use.
Sure, you could mark up a single deck with a pen or something, but I thought different colored backs would be the easiest to see in a spread. By the time you finish making one, you’ll have an another deck with the opposite colors to use as well (in my case above, the other deck would be a deck with red backed black cards, and blue backed red cards). What I do is have one deck on my kitchen table, and one under my bed. Every night before I go to bed I try and clock 5-10 times, then I do the same when I wake up. It’s been a week so far, and my speed is considerably faster than it what it was when I started. Give it a go and see how you get on!
Teaching Grown Adults How to do Addition
I’ll part with a tip on what I found made my clocking faster. After many repetitions, instead of actually calculating, I found I was just recalling a memorized answer. In the following examples, note I am casting 10s. For e.g. I just knew that 7 + 7 was 4 (7+7 = 14, dropping the 10 after to leave us with 4), 8+6 was 4, 7+6 was 3, etc. After many repetitions, I memorized the output for every combination of 2 values (in addition to thinking of 9s as just “-1″s) so I found I was literally just spreading from the face of the deck to the top without stopping to think at all. With the speed, I think I got a pretty close rendition to Erika’s performance of “clocking” at Magifest.
Alright, it’s time for a Jerry Odds and Ends again like the old days. It’s time for me also to poke my head out from under the rock I’ve been hiding under ever since my colossal fuckup the day before Magifest, but enough about that for now. (Sorry we keep dragging it out, but accountability is important to us.)
The Castle Wallet, by Simon Lipkin coming from the 1914, just might be the exception to Unworking Wallets.
Sure, you may have an EDC peek wallet already. But is it an RFID-blocking pop-up style card holder wallet?
And most importantly… does it double as an impression device?
Oh dear, is that a no I hear? You may want this as a sidekick to your Jax or Passenger or whatever the hell then.
With the help of my fellow Ovalites, I came up with a variation on a very old Daniel Madison trick. Before I get into that, I thought it’d be fun to share what led up to the conception of the effect. If you don’t care, skip along to “The New Method” below.
The other day, the perfect scenario happened. I had an inkling that the chance to perform would occur, so I put the Advocate by Daniel Madison in my pocket. I went to practice at my local martial arts club, and after class, some of my fellow classmates were talking about my magic. Despite being a part of the club for just over a year now, no one knows I do magic apart from one person, and he was telling someone next to me about the card effect he saw me do. She asked me to show her something the next time I bring a deck of cards with me. I told her that I did have a deck of cards, but it was an invisible one (try not to roll your eyes). I asked her to take out a card from the invisible deck, whilst miming spreading the cards. She took one, and I asked her what card it was.
“The 8 of Hearts.”
“Wow, you see that so clearly. The thing is—if I clasp my hands together like this, and concentrate, I can get it to materialize.”
Johannes Mengel is re-releasing his Breakthrough system for penetration through a soda can’s bottom, which is awesome! There’s a lot more to the project now than when he released it over a decade ago and it immediately proved to be the greatest method for the plot ever.
Meanwhile, everyone apparently has selective amnesia. Even people who should really know better are acting as if this is totally new and fresh and wasn’t released in 2014 already. It’s to the point where I’m fearing Mark Elsdon doesn’t even know. (This is a joke, I would be extremely surprised if he was unaware.)
Editor’s note on his own post: David Garza is not a pedophile, which is a fact that his court records back up. The previous post looks much different now than when you may have read it a couple days ago upon first publication and we would appreciate it if you reread it. (It’s pretty short now.) He was libeled by the local news as a sensationalization tactic. We are extremely sorry to him, especially because the offenses he is actually guilty of are things he has never done again in the past 25 years, and they are mistakes terrible choices that he has done his best to learn from and seek therapy for over those 25 years, most of which were spent imprisoned. (Garza himself requested that we change the word “mistakes” to “terrible choices”.) He has been slandered as a pedophile based on that FOX 8 article for years, and we are very remorseful for our role in propagating this false narrative. Jerry will receive five and twenty lashes for this. But in all seriousness, we will be dealing with this further. This is not the final word on the subject by any means. Stay tuned.
So Magifest 2026 has come and gone! Unless you’re doing the Sunday workshops, in which case you’re probably still jamming as this post goes live and I hope that you are enjoying yourself. Otherwise if you didn’t get a workshop pass, you’re likely flying out today, or already flew out this morning.
I’m joking, of course. Even though I’m writing these words Saturday night I know the truth of the matter. Just about nobody’s leaving Columbus Sunday. That shit ain’t happening. There’s gonna be a lot of glum magicians with no workshop passes and postponed flights stuck jamming in the Renaissance, in reality. Winter is going to make sure of that. Winter is coming.
Anyway; this is a communal post with contributions from each member of the Oval that attended Magifest, in no particular order. Some answers may seem like repeats or even contradictory with one another, but only if you mistakenly read it as if they are all words from the same person. Four of us attended, including someone you have not even ever seen mentioned here yet because they play a much more background role in helping to run the blog.
What Made This Magifest Special?
There was a higher ratio of women to men than ever before. Perhaps Mystify’s influence had something to do with this?
The focus of the lectures tended to be broader and more widely applicable than last year’s lectures. Rather than focusing on how to do a certain trick, the lecturers were typically more likely to talk about more abstract, philosophical, or theoretical principles. Theories were prioritized over methodologies, which was quite excellent and I hope it sticks for the next year. Felice Ling and Taylor Hughes were great examples of this.
Richard Kaufman attended this time! Even though he spent most of the time on his phone.
The winter storm that’s causing everyone to stay in! For the first time in my experience, everyone is forced whether they like it or not to stick around Sunday and jam! I mean, what else are you gonna do?
BILL. MA. LONE. BILL. MA. LONE.
What Was The Same As Last Year?
Cash was once again king at the dealer’s room.
People were walking into doors.
The best show was, as usual, done by a non-magician. The ventriloquist at the gala (Celia Muñoz) and the juggler the night before (Marcus Monroe) are the contenders this year, to be specific. Last year it was undoubtedly Leah Orleans, the dizzyingly talented clown who founded the Mystify Magic Festival.
Favorites?
Eric Mead’s shotglass production was my favorite effect because of how practical and easy it is.
My favorite show that was actually magic and not ventriloquism or juggling was Abracadabra Bitch! by Reuben Moreland.
My favorite commercial effect was Henry Harrius’ Do As I Do routine with Rubik’s Cubes that used an Ultimate RD Shell.
Felice Ling’s Portrait of a Friend was my favorite effect because of how beautiful it is and the very clever backstory behind its development.
My favorite product from the dealer’s room has to be Aurora, the remote-controlled haunted deck by Matteo Pittenger. At long last, there’s a product that both allows you to do Andy of The Jerx’s haunted deck presentation and is currently still being sold new. The jerky cut shown in the demo and trailer is not the only option. There is the ability to do a much slower and deliberate cut, and without a card jumping off solo either. The only reason you usually see the jerky cut is because it is faster to reset.
My favorite show was The Duo. The magic wasn’t anything revolutionary but I thought their dynamic was fun. There are so many magic duos out there that it was kind of cool to see a magic trio (even if it’s presented as a duo act) and the talk they gave the next day about their creative process made me appreciate the show more.
My favorite lecture was Danny Garcia’s. I’ve always liked his thinking and many of his effects are classics so it was cool seeing his interpretations of different effects, including variations on his own releases. Plus, he’s really funny.
My favorite product from the dealer’s room is probably the Morgan thin coin set because of the versatility of the gimmick and the craftsmanship that went into it. It was pretty much completely seamless and silent, and both sides could be shown. Plus Mark Mason could sell water to a fish, so it’s always entertaining to watch him demo products.
In Conclusion
Magifest 2026 was pretty swell.
That’s all. I didn’t even get to go so I don’t have much to say myself personally. But according to everyone else it was pretty swell.
This post is currently being researched further by request of the sexual offender featured. It seems he may have been the victim of a nasty campaign involving local news, a prosecutor we are now reaching out to, and other careless reporting including our own that led to many believing he is a child molester, when in fact he only groped women that were of age.
So, you know. Not a stand-up guy either way, but likely not a pedophile.(Update: He is in fact a stand up guy now, 25 years after his last offense against, once more for emphasis, an adult woman and not a minor. He is a changed man. We feel extremely badly and are very sorry for the way we have treated him.)
This of course includes ephebophiles, as a libertarian and/or ephebophile might call them. We just aren’t those, so we use the normal term pedophile. But he isn’t that either, if this checks out. That’s the point.
We will update you and restore the post if his story turns out to be bullshit, but it’s not looking that way.It is definitely not that way. He is entirely innocent against the accusations we made.
This is a way to ascertain the identity of a freely chosen playing card. What separates the Transport Peek from other methods is that the selection procedure is done entirely in the participant’s hands, and you do not need to look at the deck before, during, or after the procedure. That’s right. You never look at the deck.
What’s more is that they pocket their selection. They give you the deck, and you put it away while looking away the whole time.
I want to talk about the two events that led to the creation of this idea and, ultimately, this post. A couple of years ago, I was performing for my mentor; who was mentioned in the post Rubiked Mentor.
Alright, here’s one thing that isn’t like the old days when this place got started. Reader Mail on a Sunday when there’s supposed to be a big post, instead of on a Wednesday. Well, here’s something you may not have realized. The old schedule is as dead as Zed, baby. But we are trying to get you lots more content for now to make up for the Editor’s complete dropping of all slack for most of last year. Drew or Franklin or somebody will have some real magic content that isn’t so meta for you soon.
Anyway…
Over the past week, myself and Marty had an excellent conversation.
Yes, I know. I’m sucking Marty off again. It’s okay, he tastes great.
The point is, this conversation was enlightening even to me, so I can only imagine the depths it will bring to your shallow and feeble mind; crawling as it does up to the steps of this website and pleading weakly with its last gasps of air for a speck of insight to feast upon. So, here it is.
First, we had an exchange regarding a 25 dollar gift card for a non-Ellusionist store for a quality comment. This reply from the Editor to his thanks followed:
The first comment has been posted, and the first award has been issued; to Marty, the writer of Ruseletter and Marty’s Bag of Tricks (linked by the name on the comment), which are a couple of excellent Substacks.
He’s given us a great idea for a product too, and kindly granted his permission for us to develop and market it. So that’ll be coming soon.
But for now, you can go to the previous post to see his enriching (despite being appallingly misguided) comment, and be amazed that you could have had 25 dollars to spend anywhere other than Ellusionist if you had posted it instead.
Yeah, I’m serious, I went and sent him a 25 USD gift card to the online magic shop of his choice for that comment Drew doesn’t even agree with and will be replying to soon. Idon’t even agree with it.
