Pasteboard Puppies

Perform Dai Vernon’s “Twisting the Aces” doggy style! 😜

Dai Vernon’s classic small-packet effect, “Twisting the Aces”, is one of my favourite card tricks. I’ve been performing it for many years and, although it usually gets a good reaction, I agree with my friend and fellow magician, Justin Higham, who wrote that, even after all these years—and despite the publication of countless variations in both method and effect—it is still a trick in need of a plot.¹ He points out that turning cards over without physical action is meaningless, other than being something cool to look at. It is, like so many card tricks, a demonstration of a pointless power and one that would give you no advantage at the card table.

To be fair to Justin, he doesn’t leave the problem hanging. He offers a solution of his own: a version in which a single Ace turns over to indicate the suit of a previously chosen card, and then changes into the selection itself—a Hofzinser Aces–type plot. It works, but it comes at a price. The reversal stops being magic for its own sake and becomes a piece of information, which turns a highly visual trick into a cerebral one. 🧠 I wanted a solution that gave the reversals a reason to happen without asking my audience to think quite so hard. This aspect of “Twisting the Aces” was also discussed by philosopher and magician Eugene Burger (1939–2017) in Magic and Meaning, the book he co-wrote with Robert E. Neale.

The four Aces, ready to be twisted. The cards are from Andi Gladwin's Dapper Deck. Image Credit: Mark Williams via Unsplash.

In his essay “Are Card Tricks Card Magic?”, Burger gives a name to such effects. He calls them “the adventures of the props in the performer’s hands”.² In the piece, “Twisting the Aces” is one of his named examples. His first criticism is that such tricks carry no symbolic content—they don’t point beyond themselves to anything in an audience member’s life. “Twisting the Aces” is about what happens to the four cards; they turn upside down one at a time. That’s it.

His second indictment is that they carry no emotional content. Watching those topsy-turvy Aces cavort doesn’t involve him at the existential level of his own hopes, loves, fears, desires or dreams; he watches, he says, with something close to total non-involvement. But he doesn’t think the case is hopeless. Such tricks can be made significant to spectators, provided a thoughtful presentation supplies the required symbols and emotional resonance.

Burger taught us that turning a “card trick” into “card magic” means working harder. Card tricks, he observes, are plentiful; card magic is rare. The difference lies in whether a spectator is personally involved in the effect or merely watching something happen to four playing cards; that involvement, he says, can be symbolic or emotional, and, in an ideal world, both. So how can we justify the repeated reversals and add some meaning to the magic of “Twisting the Aces”?

Photo Credit: Eugene Burger.

My favourite solution is a version of the trick I call “Pasteboard Puppies”. I gave a brief overview of the way I handle the routine a few years ago on this blog (see “Twisting the Aces Three Ways” for full details). However, I didn’t provide a full write-up of the effect. Well, I’ve now corrected this omission, and you can learn the routine, with my current handling, by following the link below:

Learn Pasteboard Puppies

The four Fours become four badly behaved dogs that roll over on command—all except Shamrock, who won’t budge until the magician offers him walkies. The two black dogs then magically switch places with the red ones because, as you explain to the audience, they’re “purebred labracadabradors”!

• Effect Type: Reversal/Transposition
• Difficulty: ★★★★☆ (Intermediate)
• Duration: 5–7 minutes
• Setup Time: Under a minute (four Fours in CHaSeD order)
• Reset Time: None required
• Props: Four regular playing cards from a standard deck (optionally, a permanent marker and the tuck box)
• Key Moves & Principles: Elmsley Count, Jordan Count, Alignment Move, block turnover, double turnover, Plunger Principle

Learn Pasteboard Puppies 🐶🐶🐶🐶

So does this whimsical approach to “Twisting the Aces” satisfy Burger on both counts? I think it does, and here’s why.

My script opens with me as a boy: I wanted a dog, wasn’t allowed one, and imagined my playing cards were playful puppies instead.³ The theme is one of denied childhood longing—a hope left unfulfilled, and one of the emotional registers Burger says card tricks never touch. The story is also somewhat autobiographical, which makes it harder for spectators to watch the magic without involvement.

I’ve also changed the trick so that the verbal command makes each card turn upside down rather than the physical twisting action that Vernon employed. While the words “roll over” substitute for a magical gesture, the power is with the props (the “puppies”), not the performer; you ask, and the cards decide if they’re going to obey you. A card with a will is a character, and a character’s adventures are a plot. It’s also why Shamrock’s refusal isn’t simply a gag bolted onto the end. It’s the only moment in the routine with any jeopardy. Only something with a will can withhold obedience, and Shamrock refusing to obey is an obstacle, making the routine a small, laden journey rather than four reversals in sequence (descriptive exposition). That’s how “Pasteboard Puppies” escapes Burger’s “adventures of the props” trap.

In his essay, Burger also argues for simplicity of plot, and proposes that a good card trick is one a layperson can restate afterwards to someone who wasn’t there. Vernon’s original passes that test easily enough: he twisted the cards, and they magically turned over one at a time. However, what “Pasteboard Puppies” adds is that the restatement is worth making—he had four cards that were dogs, and they rolled over when he told them to, except one who held out for walkies. That’s a story rather than a summary of a procedure.

The small danger associated with adding a story to a trick is that it makes a visual piece of magic more cerebral. Justin defines visual magic as any trick that can be understood without verbal explanation. Performed with a simpler narrative, many versions of Twisting the Aces meet this condition. But “Pasteboard Puppies” fails that test—as, for what it’s worth, does Justin’s own Hofzinser solution. Even so, the script doesn’t demand that a spectator hold a complex thread or a big, abstract idea throughout the entire trick. The idea that the cards will “roll over” like dogs is fairly easy to comprehend; this is why my version of Twisting the Aces still works for a five-year-old who would struggle to follow more complex conjuring tricks.

When performed in the traditional way, “Twisting the Aces” fails to connect to the spectator’s life in the real world. Burger’s example of a trick that does point outwards is Vernon’s “Cutting the Aces”. It works, he argues, because anyone who has ever played cards knows what it would mean to control them—and what card player hasn’t daydreamed about finding the Aces whenever he liked? “Pasteboard Puppies” points outwards in much the same way, except that the daydream belongs to dog owners. What owner hasn’t wished, at least once, that their dog would simply do as it was told?

There is a difference, though, and I think it works in favour of the dogs. “Cutting the Aces” grants the fantasy: the performer really can find the Aces at will. “Pasteboard Puppies” grants it three times and then takes it away, withholding the magician’s fantasy. Shamrock’s refusal is far closer to the truth of owning a dog than four perfectly behaved pups. You get compliance most of the time and then, usually in front of company, you don’t. Nor is this only for dog owners—anyone who has given a clear and reasonable instruction to a child, who has then promptly ignored it entirely, has lived the premise and experienced the same sense of embarrassment (can you tell I have kids?). The proof, for me, comes after the performance, when people start telling me about their own badly behaved dogs (or children). Symbolic content isn’t something you have to take on trust. If your magic really does point at a spectator’s life, they’ll tell you about it, sometimes even before you’ve put the cards away.

“Twisting the Aces”, as originally described by Lewis Ganson, also fails to point to a larger magical universe beyond the performance (a phrase Burger credits to Max Maven). This is where kotodama (言霊) comes in—the Japanese belief that words and names carry a mystical power capable of influencing reality, people, inanimate objects and the environment. Give the four dogs names, then use those names to command them, and the trick starts to hint at a larger magical universe of exactly that kind, such as the one depicted in Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Spirited Away (a personal favourite of mine).

I hope you enjoy “Pasteboard Puppies” and spend the time learning, practising, rehearsing and performing this version of Dai Vernon’s “Twisting the Aces”.

Yours Magically,

Marty

P.S. Thanks again, Eugene, for your eternal insight and wisdom!

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Footnotes

1. Justin Higham, “Visual vs Cerebral Magic”, Magic Lessons in London, 26 June 2019, https://magic-lessons.co.uk/2019/06/26/visual-cerebral/. ↩
2. Eugene Burger and Robert E. Neale, Magic and Meaning (Hermetic Press, 1995), pages 129–131. ↩
3. For the record, my dad really didn’t let me have a dog, no matter how often I pleaded with him. The pasteboard puppies are an invention, though. The longing is real history; the puppies are patter. ↩