Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

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Banded Deck

Wrapping a deck in rubber bands was used to make a card transposition seem more impossible in Henry Hardin's “A Card Miracle” in Mahatma, Vol. 4 No. 7, Jan. 1901, n.p. It used duplicate cards and the goblet rotation move. Hardin would later reuse the banded deck for his marketed “Peerless Monte-Cristo Cards,” 1909, but this time as a restrictive element during a card selection process, much in the same vein as the tossed-out deck.

The description of “A Card Miracle” is unclear about whether the rubber bands were wrapped around one of the deck's axes, or both. A clear-cut instance of the deck being wrapped along both axes for an even more restrictive card change is Fred J. Peters's “A Surprising Card Trick” in Mahatma, Vol. 6 No. 6, Dec. 1902, p. 56.