Every single effect has multiple possible presentations both in terms of the outward mechanism which “causes the magic” and in terms of the nature of that magic. For instance, a penetration could be quantum teleportation or rotation through a fourth dimension. A production could be materialization from a pocket dimension or a quirky optical illusion. And a prediction of the future could be the natural outcome of an influential force exerted in the past.

And sometimes you want to take an effect you already do or borrow one from some other magician and adapt it to use a completely different presentation. This must be done with some care and thought. In particular, one must make sure not to accidentally import some aspect of the old presentation that actively undermines the new presentation.

Someone who spends a lot of his time thinking about different ways to present the same or similar effects is John Bannon, and despite the great deal of respect I have for his work, I’m going to pick on him a little bit here. But first, let me be the 99th to recommend his new Substack DEALING WITH IT that replaces his regular Genii column. A trick a month for less than $3 each? Yes please!

Resolving A Standoff

In his very first posting, which he offers as a free sampler, Bannon reveals a to-be-print-published trick called Mexican Standoff, which is a development of ideas he and others have used in the past. The basic effect, from the participant’s perspective, is that three cards chosen in advance all point toward the card they freely selected. But what is the shape of the effect? Do the cards predict the future? The beginning of his presentation seems to suggest that conclusion:

My psychic superpower sense is tingling … I may be wrong, but the vibrations tell me that these three cards may be special. They may reflect future events…

It’s worth noting that this line of “badinage” is taken directly from his presentation for “Ouija Prediction” in Very Hush-Hush. That effect is very clearly about the magician’s intuition revealing things to him about a possible future choice the participant will make through the “tingling” of three cards. But this new effect quickly goes in a different direction:

As you deal the cards, you may feel a peculiar attraction from these special cards. When you feel the urge, and you WILL feel an urge—you’ll feel a pull from these cards—then deal that card onto them.

The magician’s choice of cards is creating an attraction for the participant to set aside one particular card. So is it now that the magician is working to influence the participant to create a specific future? It clearly can’t be both an intuitive prediction of the future and an attempt to influence the future. A few moments later, the participant is being led to believe it’s actually a prediction again, but this time by the cards themselves:

Let’s see … the Seven of Hearts. That tells me your card is a Number card. And this one … the Four of Diamonds means that the card is red, and the suit is most likely Diamonds.

This sort of patter would make perfect sense for an effect where it was the deck that was predicting the future, a sort of cartomancy. The magician seems to be learning in real time what the cards want to tell him. Which would make perfect sense if the cards had been chosen from a face-down shuffled deck according to a ritual. But in this effect, that sort of plot is undermined by the fact the magician deliberately selected them from deck while looking at their faces. It’s hard to walk that line between “these particular cards are standing out to me for some reason I don’t know” and “I know exactly what these cards are communicating now that I look at them more closely.” What changed that the magician can now correctly interpret them aside from the fact that the selection procedure has ended? Why couldn’t they have been interpreted right from the beginning and the magician just say “These tell me your card will be the Ten of Diamonds?” Are we just counting on the participant not to ask questions like that? Perhaps Bannon has an answer to this when he presents it live, but he gives no hint here.

I don’t think it’s a very hot take to say that Mexican Standoff has become, in the process of adaptation from one effect to another, a very confused plot. Bannon was maybe taking notes from Tara Gilesbie when piecing this one together. So let’s fix it!

An Attractional Influence

Let’s make it completely consistent by focusing on the outcome coming as a result of the magician’s influence: These specific three cards were chosen so as to incite an urge in the participant to set aside one specific card. Rather than being hints to the magician as to what the selected card might be, each is designed to draw the participant towards certain cards more than others.

The first part proceeds exactly as Bannon describes methodologically, but in terms of the patter, there’s no mention of psychic superpowers or vibrations. You just take three cards out and put them on the table without yet trying to explain what they’re for, then hand the deck to the participant to deal over the pile until they want to stop.

Once the participant stops dealing, the magician reveals the cards dealt before the selection, spreading them out face-up on the table. “You dealt as long as you wanted to and rejected all of these.”

Then the magician picks up the four card packet for the Elmsley, and takes the top card aside. “And it really feels like you could’ve set aside any card you wanted to, yes?”

The magician performs the Elmsley into a spread as Bannon describes. “But choosing any card you wanted is not the same as having a free choice. Not if I could influence what it is that you wanted.”

The magician sets aside the bottom card (the 10D) and then raises the other three cards to face him. “And, in fact, I chose these three cards in an effort to draw you toward specific cards using their attractional influence.”

The magician glances at the cards to see the card (at the back) that the participant stopped on. In the case that the participant picked a Ten, turn over the cards from top to bottom, saying that the first card is the value you wanted and the second is the suit. If it’s not a ten, the process proceeds similarly to Bannon’s:

“The first was a [number/high] card to increase your affinity for that half of the deck.” The magician points to the face-up pile and improvises a comment that supports this claim: “I noticed you slowed your dealing slightly at the very beginning compared to later on, and you can see the [number/high] cards are much more common among these first cards you dealt, so I’d say that worked.”

“The second was a[nother] red card, a diamond specifically, in the hopes I might draw you toward the diamonds, or at the very least the red cards. And yes, you did discard a few diamonds here, but that’s okay because I was trying to draw you toward one specific diamond.”

Finally, “I was considering just leaving it at that, but just to push you over that last little hump to commit to exactly the right card at exactly the right moment, I decided to be less subtle about it and just straight up include its mate, the other red Ten. It should be obvious by now I was trying to influence you to pick the Ten of Diamonds.”

And now when the reveal comes, there is no confusion as to whether it was an intuitive prediction, cartomancy, or subtle influences leading to the right outcome–every single word of the presentation is focused without distraction on the idea that the three cards were specifically chosen to influence the participant through subtle powers of attraction.

Conclusion

When you’re developing a presentation from scratch alongside the method, it’s much easier to ensure that those things work together to consistently tell a single story. But when you’re adapting an existing method and changing the type of outward effect it represents, it may serve you best to just throw away any existing script or presentational assumptions associated with the method and write the new presentation from scratch. And while you do, pay close attention to what assumptions are backing each step of the performance.

When Bannon decided to add the “deal the cards, passing them over this pile until you feel an urge” procedure to his presentation, that was the moment that he should have committed fully to the influence plot, and carefully diked out all parts of his former presentations that contradicted the “mechanism behind the magic” that it implied. A mashup of mechanisms might seem new and innovative, but in practice, it just leads to incoherency.

Which brings us back to the title of this post. It may have looked at first like a mini review of Bannon’s trick. Not at all. It should be clear by now that I think he constructed a pretty great effect. Why else would I have spent so many words on it? Rather, the title is simply the question I always ask myself for every line of script I write and every presentational detail I add to a presentation. It’s a question every magician should be regularly asking themselves.