We all know and love Paul Harris’s Vanishing Deck. A true modern classic. I’m a big fan of it because it’s cheap and easy to set up, and once you know how to make one, you have a very versatile and powerful gimmick for life. I’ve been fooling around with it again lately and I wanted to share how I’ve been presenting it.

When I first read Paul’s standard presentation for his Vanishing Deck, I wasn’t a huge fan of it. I mean, having them think of a card, saying it vanished, then vanishing the whole deck (but not the Joker for some mysterious reason) because “you take no chances”? Eh. Mr. Harris, if you’re reading this, I’m sorry and I love you… but no, just no.

In the book I really enjoyed the alternate idea of pushing the deck through the box, and making it be a visual moment. What follows is my tiny presentational tweak on Paul’s effect, born from trying to justify that pesky leftover Joker at the end.

Effect

You’re sitting at a dinner table, chatting with your friend. During the conversation, you pull out a boxed deck of cards from your pocket. As you’re talking you take out the deck and put the tuck case on the table. The topic of conversation shifts:

“Yeah, there is this cool thing I can do. I wanted to show it to you actually. There’s no meaning behind it—it’s just for showing off. It’s like a magic ‘trickshot’ but it looks like magic. You know how every deck has two Jokers that come with it? Sometimes you need them, but sometimes you don’t. When you don’t, I have this cool way to put them away. I sort of push the deck against the box, and I can get the Jokers to ‘go through’ the box. When I first showed people this, they’d laugh and say I just had extra Jokers in the box or something. So I found a way around this to prove I was actually doing this ‘trickshot’. I just do it in reverse. Let me show you.”

You place the deck on the tuck case and push down on the cards, causing the entire deck to visually penetrate through the box. All you have in your hands are the two Jokers. You put the Jokers in your pocket and invite the Part to take out the deck for themselves.

Handling & Presentation Details

In the book, Paul talks about a “Training Wheels Vanishing Deck”, an easy way to do the effect. You just prepare the gimmick in your lap and put the boxed deck on the table before you start. This is the handling I do. I think it lends itself well to the social performer. The only difference in my handling is that I have an extra (ungimmicked) Joker on top of the gimmick. Don’t worry, this won’t affect how the gimmick works in any way. Try it out yourself! In any case (cue rimshot), however you get there, the position you need to be in is this: a boxed deck on the table, and you’re holding the activated gimmick with a Joker on top of it. Then you place “the deck” upon the box with both hands. See photos below.

Then you do the push through action and cause the deck to seemingly penetrate the box (just push and collapse the gimmick). You then slide off the two remaining cards and clearly show them. Hold one Joker in each hand, faces towards the participant. Hold the gimmick to hide the dirty part, and hold the clean Joker the same way for uniformity.

One advantage of having the regular Joker is that it can be used to cover the dirty part of the gimmicked Joker. Before putting them in your pocket, you can square two cards into a packet and have the clean Joker be the card on the face, conveniently covering the gimmicky nature of its counterpart. I think I personally prefer placing them in a breast pocket if possible, for ease of putting them away and for conservation of the gimmick.

A small note: I usually place both Jokers in the cellophane of the tuck case until I’m ready to use them. This keeps them not only safe but also out of the way of my other tricks.

A Parting Tip

With this framing, the reasoning becomes that the penetration is a flashy way to remove the Jokers from the deck. I’m not a huge fan of magic presented in a way that casts the magician as what Teller (in Derren Brown’s Absolute Magic) called a “god-like figure”. This effect was particularly tricky to make participant-centric and less I-am-a-god-centric, so I figured the best way to approach it was to own it and double down (‘sup Jerry). That’s why I frame it as a cool skill to show off.

The following bit of genius from fellow writer Franklin will take your vanishing deck gimmick to the next level. Once you have your main piece cut out, use an X-Acto blade to make small horizontal incisions to resemble the layers of cards seen on a deck’s edge. Aim for as many incisions as possible. Then on a separate piece of paper, take a pencil and scribble a big black graphite blob. Rub a couple of fingers in the graphite blob, then gently rub those graphite-smeared fingers over the small incisions on the gimmick. Make sure the graphite is evenly spread. This will create a hyper-realistic image of the front edge of a deck of cards. See the following close-up photo.