Dear friend,
Here's the story:
There's a routine many magicians perform called 'weighing the cards.'
The basic idea of this effect is that the audience cuts any number of cards they like from the deck, and the magician instantly reveals how many cards are in the packet.
Sounds cool, right?
Well...a few years ago, that's not what we thought.
We decided, without ever actually performing this trick for real spectators, that this effect was about as interesting as a pile of bricks.
(And we were VERY vocal about this opinion).
Then, one day, everything changed.
We were up late celebrating the New Year with friends when they asked to see some magic.
At the time, we were feeling incredibly lazy and wanted to perform an effect that we could guarantee would work without any effort on our part.
So we swallowed our pride and performed 'weighing the cards.'
The result?
They loved it.
In fact, they couldn't get enough, and we were blown away by the response to what we thought was a very basic effect.
Since then, this routine has become one of our favorite plots in magic.
If you don't know already, here's what the routine looks like:
(the following was performed with a borrowed deck and is not using a memorized deck for the method!)
As you can see, it plays really well for real world audiences and is an incredible solid routine to add to any card magic set.
It's as compelling as it is simple for the spectator to follow.
Here's what's included in The Libra Project:
Level 1: The base method
It's no secret that the usual way to accomplish this effect uses a stack, and we'll cover exactly how that works in this level.
Level 2: SHUFFLE the deck first
We weren't entirely stupid when we first criticized this routine. The other complaint we raised was that this routine would be much cooler if you could genuinely shuffle some or even all the cards before performing.
So in this variation we show you how you can perform weighing the cards with a VERY convincing and real shuffle sequence.
Level 3: No memory work and you can shuffle the deck
In this variation, we show you how to perform 'weighing the cards' without any memory work-and while using the same shuffle sequence as above.
Level 4: No memory work, you can shuffle the deck, and you never look at the faces
It gets even better. In this variation, you never look at the faces of the cards, you give the cards a genuine shuffle before you begin-and zero memory work is required.
Level 5: Experimental ideas
In this level we show you some admittedly ambitious but fun ways to perform 'weighing the cards' impromptu with a borrowed deck.
BONUS: Benji's Shuffle Sequence
Included with this project you'll get an incredibly helpful and as far as we know entirely original shuffle sequence that looks like a real shuffle but acts like a faro.
Total Video Run Time: 1 hour.
