Magic Tricks

This book deserves a review, and I guess I'm the one to do it. You may have seen Carl’s YouTube channel and can appreciate the intelligent, stream of consciousness, thoughts he delivers. That voice is easily heard when reading this book.

While the title is vague the primary purpose of this book is to teach an accessible way to build and use a full deck stack, relying on Carl's common stack. This is not a way to expand your usage of Mnemonica, Aronson or any of the others. It does require a decision to use the Common Stack and there is some work involved in learning and applying it.

I’m a big fan of his trick "Going Home". As far as I know, the plot is original with him. There’s a download on Penguin, but I would certainly suggest that the information in this download is all you need and it may even be an advancement on the earlier work. This is where the best part of the book lies – his work on the Tetridistic stack. One stack is very simple and may well be all anyone ever needs. The other stack builds on this with throw offs designed to make the order less noticeable.

There’s information on card indexing and false shuffles. Nothing groundbreaking, but useful.

Is the book perfect? Nope! It’s a first edition of a self-published book and suffers from lack of editing. Carl is a little prone to run on sentences, but not bad. Descriptions are good, but could use a little cleanup in places to improve clarity.

The biggest flaws are the file is not searchable, although that can be fixed with freely available tools (which makes me wonder why it wasn’t done) and the Table of Contents isn’t linked, which is frustrating. Maybe there’s a reason for these omissions.

Anyway, I’m going with Five Stars. While I’m not one of the, “if I only get one trick out of a book, I’m happy” crowd, there’s A LOT of quality material here for a few bucks. I do fear his chosen moniker of The Common Magician tends to trivialize his work, which is a shame.