talkmagic.co.uk

Fairies wrote:

Errrrr ok - why?....

Oops - Sorry

I sort of guessed that your work with Dr. Todd would make you the person who would know.

As an alternative, have you considered making your own deck?

I agree with Replicant!
I've made a deck for myself (printer, CorelDraw and g o o d paper) and now there is really something magic in it .
It's like cooking for yourself. Tastes better.

Just a little addition to the thread. Last weekend a friend of mine spent at least half an hour examining my set of Royal Magic ESP cards. He actually (eventually) noticed the subtle one-way design but did not realise the significance. But he completely failed to note the symbol marking. And no-one that evening made any comment about the starry back.

Food for thought.

Ted wrote:Just a little addition to the thread. Last weekend a friend of mine spent at least half an hour examining my set of Royal Magic ESP cards. He actually (eventually) noticed the subtle one-way design but did not realise the significance. But he completely failed to note the symbol marking. And no-one that evening made any comment about the starry back.

Food for thought.

Unless you the magician makes a big deal out of it, nobody ever comments about the stary starry back. Nobody thinks it is odd because they are NOT PLAYING CARDS they are ESP cards and only magicians get hung up on the issue.

I absolutely agree. I once surveyed my friends on what they thought about various card backs, including Bicycles. They simply did not care and had no opinion about which looked most common, suspicious etc.

I mention this and the ESP anecdote simply because the subject comes up every so often and it's worth adding some realism to the debate.

Ok, i'll say it..

its an asthetic choice, to me, those esp cards look...

well...

sh*te.

its purely from a design perspective, they look awful. there. swallow that news down like a fine wine.

so yes, design your own-i have, well a variant of at least, with a word, number and place set of tests too. so up yer bum!

Aesthetically I agree. But practically, from the POV of the spectators, it doesn't seem to matter. So for those who want an easy solution is seems that Royal Magic ESP cards won't raise an eyebrow of suspicion, but aesthetes like Iain might vomit.

Ted wrote:Just a little addition to the thread. Last weekend a friend of mine spent at least half an hour examining my set of Royal Magic ESP cards. He actually (eventually) noticed the subtle one-way design but did not realise the significance. But he completely failed to note the symbol marking. And no-one that evening made any comment about the starry back.

Food for thought.

My wife did the same with my Royal Magic ESP cards and she failed to find anything untoward after a minute or two of scrutiny. I'm just waiting for Michael to get more stock of Beyond ESP to buy a copy.

... and if you are looking for a perfect tuck case for the Royal ESP cards, well:

http://www.magicbycardmaker.com/pageID_9686178.html

...and for some reason if the cards are too classy and too perfect they become even more suspect. In fact that often takes away from the effect. The panther deck, green decks, inverted decks all take away from the effect because the spectator is more interested in the deck then the effect. Same is true with odd coins.

Yeah I use ESP cards quite a bit, and have both the BESP2 and the PLF cards.

Neither marking system is noticed, but for pure feel and quality I would have to go with the PLF cards.



E x

bmat wrote:...and for some reason if the cards are too classy and too perfect they become even more suspect.

This is probably over-thinking on my part, but it's fairly unlikely until recently that Zener cards produced by any research body would be particularly well designed any way. I think that's what forgives the star background to some extent - looks fairly awful, but you can easily believe someone slapping any old back on a deck of Zener cards because that's probably not of interest to the research. This is less true in this DTP / internet era but holds true with cards that are supposed to be from or recreations of the Rhine era.

If I made a tonne of Royal Magic R/S force decks, a la pop-eyed popper (which I invented 80 years after someone called Hull), would anyone here be interested in buying one?

I figure that Royal Magic is the way to go because you could easily swap it out for a standard deck. And it's cheap.

Yeah, go on then. In fact you wouldn't even need to R&S mine, I can do that myself.