VANISHED & GONE
PETER DUFFIE

A spectator thinks of a card. He doesn't take one from the deck or do anything else but decide on a particular card in his mind.

Despite these precautions, the magician immediately and in no uncertain manner reveals the thought of card.

Certainly this is an ideal scenario to convince an audience they are in the prescence of a master magician. It is also a scenario whose solution usually relies on something other than sleight of hand.

Techniques for demonstrating foreknowledge of a thought of card as soon as its name is spoken aloud include card indexes, stacked or memorized decks and gaffed decks. The gaffed, sometimed specially printed, deck is a popular solution because it is easier than most of the alternatives.

This isn't to say that using a gaffed deck is simple. The worker must be intimately familiar with the working and handling of such a deck. There are few outs if something goes wrong. In addition, the gaffed deck must be rung in and out of play so the spectators are unaware of its existence. Vanished & Gone will no doubt be quite a mystery to those watching. For the performer there's something quite amusing in the deck Duffie has created and the way he goes about using it.
Despite these caveats, trick decks such as the Brainwave, Ultra Mental, Stripper and Svengali are popular with magicians. Which brings me to a contribution to this genre from Peter Duffie.

Duffie's 'Vanished & Gone' fulfills the requirement of the just think of a card scenario by demonstrating that the card is either vanished or gone.

The semantics involved here are not brought to the spectator's attention, however the purchaser should be aware that it is 50-50 whether the thought of card will be 'gone' or will be vanished.
The Vanished & Gone deck is a clever variation of the classic Fido deck and its descendants such as the Phil deck. Specially printed in Bicycle poker, the deck uses an ingenious setup so that in running through the cards face up asking the spectator to think of one you are assured that the card will either not be in the deck or, if it is, will be the only card in the deck with Gone boldly printed on its back.

The well written instructions explain how the effect can be done with the spectator holding the deck and dealing out the cards looking for his selected card without ever saying it aloud. A second handling finds the magician holding the deck while the spectator names his thought of card.

'Vanished & Gone,' Peter Duffie, Elmwood Magic.
$ 20.00