This trick FOOLED ME FIVE TIMES IN A ROW. That doesn’t happen a lot, but I’m man enough to admit it.

MUTE was the actually first trick that Ryan ever showed me. I was CLUELESS. And since that time…the trick has grown more and more
deceptive.

Here’s how it looks:

Your friend walks out of the room. Somebody picks a card and puts it back in the deck. It really goes in the middle, and the cards really go in the box. Then your friend walks back into the room…and she INSTANTLY knows what the card was picked.

YOU DON’T SAY ANYTHING. (Hence the trick’s title: Mute.) In the past, tricks like this were accomplished by complex verbal coding, but with MUTE, you say NOTHING. You don’t have to hold your body in a certain position. No hand signals, either. No palming or indexing or fancy sleight-of-hand. Nothing like that.

And most importantly: NO FORCE. The spectator can select WHICHEVER card he wants. Hell—he doesn’t even have to physically pick the card; he can just NAME it.

THAT’S why MUTE fooled me five times in a row. Everything I was looking for (forces, words, hand signals)…JUST WASN’T THERE.


One of the most powerful and most underused premises in magic is PASSING THE POWER onto somebody else. And ANYONE can perform MUTE with you. You don’t need a magic partner or anything like that. You can teach somebody how to do MUTE with you IN TWO MINUTES FLAT. Your friend, your girlfriend, your wife, your partner, your co-worker, some dude you meet at a party—ANYONE can do this with you, and it will FOOL THE HELL OUT OF EVERYONE WATCHING.

I know this firsthand. Which is weird; usually I’m the one doing the fooling, but this time, it was all Ryan. Like I said, I’m man enough to admit this.

-Rick Lax