The Neural Miracle by Phill Smith

Welcome to the future…

A future when mind and matter become one through incredible technology without parallel – imagine a unique mental experience, a neural miracle connecting your thoughts with a singular deck of cards, allowing unprecedented insight and…

Ah, I just can’t keep it up. My name’s Phill, I design magic (it’s a real job trust me) and this is the Neural Miracle – I know, it doesn’t say that on the picture, I’ll explain why later. The Neural Miracle is an easy magic trick with an amazing fun story to tell – inside the trick you put on a smart silicon wristband that (according to the story) is connected digitally to the playing cards, linking them directly to your brain with a neural interface. Once connected this lets you know everything about the cards. You can mix and cut the cards and you’ll know what the top card is, what the face card is, spectators can name a number and you can tell them what card is at that position. They can name Aces and you can tell them where exactly in the deck each named Ace falls, you can tell them where the pair for the top card is, you can even spell to cards from anywhere in the deck… it’s a miracle!

And if that’s not amazing enough, you can even have the audience think of a card they’ve just spotted in the deck, and when they tap THEIR phone on the neural interface wristband a message will appear on screen telling them the name of the card they are just thinking of.

Of course, the way this works “ISN’T” that you have this world’s first incredible impossible neural interface that links directly to your brain – it looks like it is, but the real method is much easier. The cleverly designed deck of cards does the work for you, along with the simple wristband (which isn’t really a neural interface – that’s just part of the story, but which really can ping information onto the screen of a mobile phone that’s tapped against it) – you don’t need to be a master magician of an expert at sleight of hand: this trick is what magicians call a SELF WORKER. That means that when you know how it works, and when you have practiced it a bunch, then YOU can do the trick the exact same as I do it in the video. It’s a great piece, and because it’s so easy to actually do, you can concentrate on having fun with your audience, your friends and family, co-workers, clients, whoever you decide to show off to.

Why is it called Neural Miracle and not…?

OK so, why doesn’t this trick have the name of the deck that you can see in the video and on the photographs? Well, if you’re like me, if someone showed you this trick, and you thought it might be real, the first thing you would do would be to Google it! If the first result on Google was this page, it would kind of give the game away, so I’m being very careful not to use the brand name on the deck of cards in the text here. If you talk about the deck online with anyone, it would be really great if you could do the same.

What does the deck do?

Firstly, the deck does almost all the work (you don’t really need the wristband other than for the final reveal). It doesn’t connect to your brain but it CAN tell you a lot of information in a very easy way. You can cut the cards ANYWHERE and immediately know:

What the top card is
What the bottom card is
The cards at any of the top 12 positions
The position of any named Ace in the deck
The position of the pair for the top card
What card you can spell to
It takes almost zero practice to be able to do this, and you don’t have to do the entire routine as per the video, demonstrating absolutely everything in one go – in fact it’s more fun to spread it out over a few performances – it makes it more convincing IMO.

What does the wristband do?

Well, it does what it says in the video – you tap an NFC enable phone (which is most phones) against it, and it pings up with a message like the one you see in the clip. How does it know which card the spectators are thinking of? Well, that’s the magic part – and I’ll teach you a bunch of very easy foolproof methods in the pdf and the video. PLEASE NOTE: If you have an iPhone there is a little extra bit of faff involved to get it to work, but it’s simple and I explain it all. If you want to use your phone to perform this trick it is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to check if it is capable of reading NFC chips.

Is this Neural Interface real?

I’ve been a little worried that someone will complain and demand their money back because what they’ve received is not an actual neural interface, or that the deck of cards is not ‘digitally connected’ (whatever that means!). Both the deck and the wristband are props that allow the trick to work, they are both special and unique in their own way, but they are NOT a neural interface and a special digital deck of cards – if they were, this project would cost A LOT more.