Magnum Opossum
John Hostler
John Hostler presents Magnum Opossum... a compilation of 21 professional-caliber routines, effects, and sleights for the dedicated close-up magician. Items include the best of Hostler's material from rare, limited-issue manuscripts and periodicals dating back to 1987.
46,000 Words
172 Photographic illustrations
144 Pages
21 Routines and effects
1 Beautiful hardcover with dust jacket
Contents include...
BERTHA: A new take on the classic "Fred" effect that ends with the deck in your spectator's hands.
$13 CARD TO WALLET: Card-to-wallet with a surprise repeat. No palming, an examinable wallet, and two killer loads.
SPEAKEASY POKER DEAL: A Rauschenberg-style poker deal with a prohibition-era twist.
IMAGINEINK: A downright spooky demonstration of the power of suggestion, in which a spectator momentarily loses touch with reality.
ESTIMATED PROPHET: Aronson's classic Shuffle Bored cut to the bone… with a shuffled deck in use.
FIVE CARD MENTAL LEAP: Dai Vernon's "Five Card Mental Force" and Henry Hardin's "Princess Card Trick" meet at last.
THE RATCHET CUT: An easy-as-falling-out-of-bed, joyously deceptive false cut.
THE RAUSCHENBERG EFFECT: Ambitious card meets Triumph, culminating in the deck reverting to its pre-printed state.
DIM MAK (PRESSURE POINT 2.0): Heat from the magician's fingertips causes cards to rise (ambitious-style), slither (haunted-style), and ultimately vaporize.
THE TRISKADEQUADRA PRINCIPLE: This principle isolates and leverages some very special mathematical properties inherent in a riffle-shuffled deck. Includes four applications — Bar Bits, Rogue Heart, Colm Mulcahy's Flushed with Embarrassment, and the TDQ Deck — a force/pump deck that can be shuffled by a spectator.
SANADA MEETS ELMSLEY: Straight from the notebooks . . . a new brand of peek involving the strange melding of two completely unrelated principles.
THE KLUTZY MENTALIST: The performer accidentally springs a deck of pasteboards to the floor. Despite the pack's haphazard condition, he is perfectly situated for the mental selection of a "pumpable" card.
ROYALLY WILD: Wild card with no gimmicks and a royal flush kicker.
NEW SPEEDAY BOOGIE: A super-clean backfire assembly purged of unnecessary counting and proving. All cards may be left on the table for examination.
TELL MONTE: Tell-reading with nods to Hummer and Curry. This one will test you.
CUED REDUX: A bare-handed, technically delicious broken-and-restored toothpick.
NOEYEON PROTOCOL: An approach to rapidly locating the mate (or duplicate) of a freely selected card with no knowledge of its identity.
ALLIGATOR: A rapid-fire demonstration of precognition, telepathy, and clairvoyance leveraging a number of ingenious mathematical principles.
CONVOID: The mutilated-and-restored bill with a clearly visible hole, no cover, and no bill switch.
VISIONS OF SARAGOSSA POKER DEAL: Stupefyingly "drunken poker" with a shuffled deck in use. Free selections cut into the deck by four volunteers are located in electrifying fashion.
CRYPTICAL ENVELOPMENT: The magician implants a false memory of a freely sighted card, and somehow manages to prove it.
Available at www.magnumopossum.com