Manipulating the deck inside the box

People who are new to cardistry tend to enjoy one thing: big, extravagant movements. Often they’ll make large sweeping gestures with their arms when to make up for the fact that the deck is not doing much work.

One example I came across recently in the submission queue is manipulating a full deck… inside the box.

OMG CRAAAZY!……. NOT! (oh no he didn’t just do that)

Taking the box and throwing it around is NOT impressive on its own. If you’re tossing the box from one hand to the other, or kicking it, anybody can do this. especially if kicking it is causing the box’s rotation to screw up at the same time. And then you catch it in a fumbling manner.

I’ve seen it in other videos too where people take the box and just fumble it as much as they can in their hands to make it do as much as possible, even though it’s obvious they have no control, and there’s no pattern or thought going into it except FAST FAST FAST.

And get this… I’ve seen a boxed deck toss from one hand to the other, in front of the body, get pushed into SLOW MO. Oh man.

Sometimes its amazing to see what new people will put in slow mo. It really gives you a different perspective on things.

As far as I can tell there are generally two reasons newbies make things slow mo:

1. Laymen think it’s cool (because they’re still almost laymen themselves)
2. It’s SIMILAR to an impressive move, but much easier to accomplish.

Now again, this is not something to be shy about or to necessarily avoid. If you do any of the above it’s not necessarily a “bad” thing, you are learning. Everybody starts off from scratch and sometimes people forget that they were there too. Just because you’ve practiced for years and have been spending a lot of time to hone your skills doesn’t mean you should expect everybody else to be at your level too.

I’m writing in a bit of a whiny tone because I have to go through this kind of video all the time and in a sense I want people to recognize where videos can go wrong for the cardistry audience and what they can do to fix it.

So with that, how can you manipulate the boxed deck and make it look cool?

I think most boxed deck ideas I’ve seen come from De’vo. Deck openers and closers, in particular. And then you’ve seen (or should see) Cradle To Grave as well. These moves all have purpose.

One sequence Bone did a lot of the time (and was then imitated by many others) was his version of the opener where he would spin the deck in about 4 different ways. In a sense I don’t like it because I think at one point it goes into a flipback just to be caught in dealers grip again (seemed kind of like a pause that didn’t belong), but all the moves had obvious control and was planned out.

Something else I’m pretty sure I’ve seen done (though I’m sure it HAS been done — but not by who) was Jerry’s “Deck Twist” (see Encyclopedia of Playing Card Flourishes) — oh hold on a second, I’m pretty sure I saw all of this on Jerry’s latest DVD (Volume 3)! He also did something where he basically kept the box in the same location and just re-gripped everywhere. It was pretty funny, but it’s essentially a contact juggling-type concept that could have some interesting applications.

Generally I’m not sure that if there’s much of a point in manipulating the box unless you are in the process of taking the cards in or out, or if you’re making a point of PRESENTING the deck. But if you’re just manipulating the box and that’s the routine, it ain’t so hot.

But hey, maybe there’s something I’m missing. I’ll put a challenge out in a new post.