Magic Tricks Revealed: The Mind Boggling Magic Eraser

by: George Hutton

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Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 Time: 7:58 AM - 0 comments

Here's a great trick that if done correctly, will quickly dazzle your audience. It requires a deck of cards, some at home practice, and a good dose of patter. When you combine all these ingredients, you are sure to have a trick that your audience will never forget. This trick is best done in a string of other similar card tricks or other illusions.

This is how the trick will seem to your audience. You produce a pencil, with no eraser. You can use a pencil that really doesn't have a built in eraser, like a golf pencil, or you can get a regular pencil and remove the metal part at the end that holds the eraser, or you can simple break the eraser off. This tends to have a more comical effect, and increases the effectiveness of this trick.

You describe your pencil as having a magic eraser. And this magic eraser can erase anything. You may tell a story how you accidentally erased the numbers on your wife's credit cards or something. Then you pull out a normal deck of cards, and explain that you are going to erase all the faces from the cards. Nobody, of course, will believe you, so you must show them that the deck is a normal deck of cards, and fan them out to show them.

Then you wave your magic eraser over the deck a few times. As you fan out the cards, they will notice that everything on the face of the cards has been blanked, and all they will see is white. Then you close the cards back up, stick them in the box, and explain you don't know why you do this trick, as every time you do so it ruins a perfectly good deck of cards. Then you grab a new deck, or the props for your next trick and continue.

This illusion is really fairly basic. When you fan the cards out, you carefully make sure that only the white edges are exposed. With all fifty two cards like this, the deck will appear to be fanned out quite a lot, and will give the impression that all the cards are indeed white. Naturally, you can't stand there for twenty minutes holding the cards out, nor should you hold your hand perfectly still for more than a second. Simply wave the cards around for a second or two at most, and then continue as described above.

This is a trick where technique and patter must work well together. You'll need to practice enough times on your own so that you can easily do it without looking, so they really appear to have been erased. You'll need to do this without looking at them when you the trick, and don't pause in the middle of your story while you're doing so. That will give the audience a lot to concentrate on, and they won't have time to wonder how you did the trick. So it helps to have a good trick to quickly move into after you do this one. Have fun.