How to Combine Regular Cards with a Svengali Deck

Series Summary

In his novel Trilby, George Du Maurier portrays Svengali as an evil hypnotist who uses his skills to manipulate the title character. Trilby becomes a great singer, but she can only perform up to standard while in a trance. In contemporary usage, the term has come to refer to a person who manipulates another with selfish, even sinister motives. While a magician is trying to fool you with a svengali trick deck loaded with multiple copies of the same card, his intent is most likely entertainment rather than convincing you to do his evil bidding. But if they try to bet you a big pile of money that they can guess your card, just ask them to see the deck.

In this second installment of our series on the svengali deck, our expert magician Malik Haddadi demonstrates more great tricks. Learn how to perform the grand maneuver known as the all alike trick, which transforms what appears to the audience as a normal deck of cards into a deck of cards which are all the same. Malik also shows you how to combine multiple decks and predict the card your audience volunteer will choose.

Video Transcript

"Hi everybody! I'm going to just talk to you just briefly for a minute about a Svengali deck and a regular deck. If you look down on the table here, I've got one of each. One of these is the Svengali deck and one of them is the regular deck. This one is the regular deck, but as you can tell, they look pretty similar because they're both made out of Bicycle cards. A Bicycle card Svengali deck is available from any of the real professional magic dealers. You can find them online all over the place. Just type in magician supplies to any search engine and you should come up with a whole bunch of ideas. Now, as you explore magic and you read some of the more advance literature, you'll learn about switching decks of cards in and out. If you're doing a set of card magic and you want to use the Svengali deck for some it and a regular deck for some of it, that's okay. The main point of this is I want to encourage you to explore your creativity. Once you figure out how this works and you learn some of the other tricks I'm going to show you, you'll find out and figure out ways to apply a regular deck to the routines as well, combine it, use it for predictions, switch decks in and out, that kind of thing. I just wanted to talk to you briefly about that. Take advantage of the fact that they look the same. Come back and I'll show you some more tricks you can do with a Svengali deck."