 Hey everybody welcome back to magic orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a rant That's right everybody. This is gonna be a rant You know sometimes I do reviews for card tricks sometimes I do reviews for decks of cards But not always do I get to share with you my personal opinion and you know I was thinking about something the other day and it kind of just went yeah, why is that like that? And so I want to talk to you today about Blank cards, you know there's a couple different types of blank cards You can get out there they come to you in your deck as a gas They say hey you want a gas here's a blank card and you're like wow Thank you. I guess I mean there's the blank card That's the double blank right and then there's the blank card that has the back design But then the face it's a blank and you're like wow this doesn't feel like a gas I mean sometimes there's trick cards. Those are cool. There's double backers And you're like, okay, I know to do with a double backer double facers I know what to do with a double facer But what do you do with a blank? Like is this a real gas card or where you just lazy and just didn't want to put anything on the face Just oh, it's a blank card I mean some people will take this and they'll make it an advertisement card or a coming soon card or a preview for something else But just to give me the back design with a blank face like Why what do I do with this? Well, some people I don't know what you do the magic trick where you have a person's card selected And then you're like watch I can take all the ink off of it now It's blank now if I hand this out to somebody they're gonna say this is just a blank card like Where's my where'd my card go? So I was thinking all right What are some ideas that you could do with a blank card and still be magical or still be fun? Well, I think you know what when you get a blank card like this This is a perfect opportunity for a writing surface like this is a blank piece of paper It's a great place to write something down You know a lot of times we're forcing cards and then we're giving them pen and say sign your name And then they're you know, they got a jack of diamonds and they're trying to find okay Where's a good place where they can see my signature? But if you have a blank card you well you can write your name wherever you want And so the first thing that jumps to my mind is the ambitious card routine the ambitious card routine doesn't need a card Per se to do the trick. That's why we allow them to take any card. They want Doesn't matter which card they take they can take any card they want and then from there on We utilize that card. Why not start your ambitious card routine with a blank card Have them sign their name and draw a picture say, you know what you get to make your own card because I want you to be dead Center perfect positive that this is your card So make your own card draw a happy face on it a gesture your favorite, you know Limerick or whatever write inspirational words of wisdom and sign your name to it only to make this card as unique as possible Then there's no way in the world there could be a duplicate of this every time they see this It's gonna be their card use a blank card for an ambitious card routine and not a regular playing card All right idea number two Sometimes we do tricks that involve jokers because we have two jokers and they're identical But we don't necessarily need them for the trick. We need them as placeholders You could say only to take this joker and insert it into the deck, right? There's a routine where you have two spectators Okay, and you hand them the deck and they count down cards face down And then each spectator places a joker Where they stop counting and they place the remainder of the deck on top and then you give the same deck to the second spectator They count down You know this trick and you stick the joker on a on the selected on their selection They place the remainder of the deck and they hand it back to you and then you spread the cards and you find There are two jokers and the cards that correlate Okay, what if instead of giving them jokers you give them blank cards and again? They sign their name. You say this is Mark's card. That's a Sally's card I'm sure those aren't names of your real friends But then once you fan the cards, then it's very easy to remember. Look, here's Mark's name So it's not a joker, right? Like I don't remember if that's Mark's joker So you say oh look Mark, there's your card and you slide it out with the card He selected you they say oh look Sally there's your card and you slide it out with the card She's selected then it becomes way more personal and at the end of the trick they get to keep their cards Usually take your jokers back, you know, and I think that's the thing with some of our cards We take them back and so the magic kind of leaves with us But it's always great to leave your spectators with some little piece of reminder of that magical experience that they have So if you can take some of these blank cards that you got lying around that you're not sure what to do with Start using these as your placeholders start using these as your jokers Start using these as your cards that you want to control allow your spectators to draw on them sign them do anything they want Use them for mentalism number of forces anything like that, you know use them up Okay, let's stop Let's get them out of our drawers and start writing and scribbling all over them and handing them out to our spectators And I guarantee you you probably use this gaff a lot more and probably appreciate it a lot more All right, so are there other ideas other ideas out there that you have for a blank card I'd love to hear them. We'd love to dialogue. Let's get into a discussion And I don't mean the standard tricks that you can do with a blank card Something that you've thought of okay something creative something that you think that would be a great idea We'd love to carry on this conversation with you a little further. So comment below Let us know what's going on you can also join the conversation on facebook You know, I got a social media on facebook. You can link me there. You can like me over on twitter I'm over there too and I'm on instagram lots of places for you to jump in and get this going And of course you can check out all of our magic reviews and card reviews at magic orthodoxy dot