Is Card to Pocket a bad trick to do on stage?

[magical_ki]

One of my favourite card tricks to do is the classic card to pocket, with the finisher being the entire deck being in the pocket except for the spectator's chosen card. My university's magic club is planning to do a performance night on stage with an audience of around 80 people, and as soon as I signed up and mentioned that I wanted to do card to pocket, many of the members discouraged me to choose this trick. Here are the reasons they listed out:

1. 1. Card to pocket is a common and well known trick.

- While I won't argue that this isn't true, I don't think this reason by itself justifies eliminating the trick altogether. Furthermore, I feel the presentation of the trick is substantially more important than the trick itself. My performance style is very fun and lighthearted, and I'm more concerned with making sure the audience is enjoying themselves through my patter and humor rather than impressing them via the effect, which is why I love card to pocket so much. If professional magicians at the Magic Castle still perform card to pocket then I don't see why I should be discouraged from performing it too.

2. The trick is not suitable for the stage.

- I agree that card magic isn't genuinely suitable for the stage, but I have performed this trick on stage multiple times before and have had great success (at least, that's what it seemed like based on the audience's feedback, I hope I'm not being too overconfident). Granted, this was during high school, and the uni club members did mention that a high school environment is extremely different from a university environment, which is fair enough.

3. Magic like card magic is more likely to go wrong on stage.

- The university club had a meeting regarding the details of the performance and they advised to performers to choose tricks that don't require a spectator as that increases the odds of the trick going wrong (spectator doesn't follow instructions, drops cards, etc.) I strongly disagree with this advice. Shawn Farquhar is known for saying that he believes magic that happens in the spectator's hands is much more powerful than magic that happens in the magician's hands, which is contradictory to the advice given by my uni club. Yes, there is a risk when spectators are involved, but it makes the magic that much more awe-inducing.

With all this said, I'm not a professional but rather a card magician hobbyist, and many of the university club members are excellent magicians. However, I wonder if the difference comes from our philosophies when it comes to performance. It seems that they're more interested in maintaining a mysterious presence and deeply fooling the audience, while I'm more interested in using magic as a vessel to give the audience a good time by making them laugh and smile with my eccentric personality. Perhaps my thoughts are misguided? Can anyone share their thoughts on performing card to pocket on stage?

 

[DavidL11229]

It worked ok on Fool Us, but beyond that it's a matter of deciding if the others who are trying to give you advice have the knowledge and experience to make their advice worth following. You'll be okay either way. 80 people isn't really much beyond parlour magic.

 

[WitchDocIsIn]

While I don't think Card To Pocket is a great trick for the stage, it's not for the reasons they are listing. Point 1 - Magicians consistently overestimate the commonality of magic in a layman's life. Yes it's more common to see tricks online these days, and there are a lot more people doing street magic, but it's still pretty rare and if you're not actively into magic you'll probably forget about the videos you see. Point 2 I'll come back to in a moment. Point 3 - If their main concern about using a volunteer is that the volunteer is going to mess things up, that says more about their lack of performance skill or experience than the frequency with which a volunteer causes a problem.

As to Point 2. The problem I see with card tricks on stage is visibility. Cards are very small. Once you're more than say 8-10 feet away you can't really see any details. So anything that requires members of the audience to be able to identify more than the color of the card is going to fall flat most likely. So, you have to have a presentation that removes any necessity of identifying specifics in a card trick. Mac King does this with his Invisibility Cloak CtP routine, which is hilarious.

It seems like you've already dealt with that aspect of the routine so I'd say you're probably fine to use a routine you've honed.