inconvenient index
Most of the time magicians want a super slim portable index in their pocket. This idea is the exact opposite of that. It doesn’t fit in your pocket, and you can’t take it with you anywhere. In fact, people need to come to you.
The idea is that you plant an index around your room/apartment/house- but probably in just one or two rooms. And you plant them in places that you can easily remember and access- but just one per location. Everything from under a small object that you can pick up and play around with to a book you’d flip through to under a chair that you steal out from when you scoot it forwards or backwards.
You’ll be doing a trick where you don’t necessarily need to be in one place. Or you’re coming into the room to do something. You’d go to the location of the corresponding card and steal it from it’s location to load or whatever.
But 52 places seems like a lot. And it is. So one thing I’ve been digging a lot is you don’t need to index all 52 cards- you just use 12. 12 face cards + one step equivoque.
They imagine a deck of cards in front of them. Then remove either the face cards or number cards. Let’s say they remove face cards. From those they then remove one face card. Or if they remove the number cards, then from the remaining face cards they’ll remove all but one face card.
Once you get past the first step, it’s all free choice as long as you keep following that pattern. They’re either removing from what they removed, or removing from what they’re keeping. And you can still then add in extra steps after the first step to buy time if you need.
This doesn’t even have to be for this Inconvenient Index idea. If you have this stack on top of the deck- Jacks, Queens, and Kings in CHSD order, you can easily locate a named card with a quick spread through or pinky count. I think a one-step equivoque is worth it. And it’s even easier than the kindergarten stack. This is more like a pre-k stack. Unlike a full stack, this will take way less time to set up, and a large portion of the deck can be genuinely shuffled- which also means it’s easier to clean up.
So I guess this can actually be pretty convenient. Haha.
I’m pretty close to finishing a small set of notes for a popular trick using this partial stack. If I can be not indecisive for once, I’ll share those notes in the next few postings.