elmsley vanish control

This is a lead-up to a bigger idea. It’s a smaller part that when combined with some other stuff makes for a utility sequence to force one or a small bank of cards. I’ll get to the force on the next post. For now, this control/vanish thing- depending how you use it, is simply this:

You spread through the deck face up and have a card name/touched/selected. You use cull de select to bring the card to the back/top of the deck- but you also cull one more card after it. So after, with the deck still face up, you’ll have: x-card (at the back) / the selection / rest of the deck.

Now you spread and take small groups of cards off the face and place them face down into a pile on the table. When you have between 4 to 7 cards left, you execute an elmsley count and place that final packet face down on top of the table pile. You have just shown the entire deck face up, and the selection is now on top.

You’ve just shown that their card has vanished and controlled it to the top. Now this doesn’t have to be a vanish. You can run through the deck much quicker and feed them the idea that even though they may not remember exactly where they saw their card, their subconscious probably knows. Or whatever presentation you’d like to use depending on where you’re going with the trick.

Handling-wise, you can also give them the cards to hold instead of putting it on the table. And you can also take out the aces/jokers/four-of-a-kind/whatever as you place the cards on the table/in their hands.

Next post, we’ll add some stuff to this process to build a forcing process that happens completely in their hands while they’re shuffling.