Craig Petty’s Atomic Deck released recently and there’s lots of hype and complaints. The product is an ACAAN effect. A big negative that people identified with the release is that it requires a phone. The flagship routine requires the spectator to go to a specific website to enter their choice of card and number. The website will then spit out a “percentage” which the magician needs complete the effect.
If you’re willing to require a phone, there’s a much easier way to achieve an ACAAN. Instead of having the website be some strange page that gives statistics about the likelihood of card-number combos, just have it be a random generator site. You can use the excuse that human’s are bad at generating true randomness. The spectator will be invited to go to the site and press a button that randomly chooses a card. The spectator is free to press this button as much as they like. Then once satisfied, the spectator presses a different button to generate a number. The spectator can even generate multiple numbers. The secret of course being that the numbers will exactly match the index in one of the stacks you’ve prepared.
Let’s assume that the spectator will generate at most 6 numbers so you’ll need 6 stacks prepared. The procedure to determine which stack to use will be as follows. We’ll assign the values 1,2,3,4 to clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades respectively. Then add that number to the value of the card (with J, Q, K being 11, 12, 13). So the 7 of Diamonds will be \(2+7=9\). Since we have 6 different decks, we’ll take this number modulo 6. For those not familiar with modular arithmetic, you can think of it as taking the remainder. In our example, \(9\) divided by \(6\) is \(1\) with a remainder of \(3\), so we say that 9 is equivalent to 3 mod 6. Then suppose the spectator’s “random” number is 25. \(25\) divided by \(6\) has remainder \(1\). Then we can simply subtract \(3-1=2\) to know to choose the 2nd deck. If the number is negative, add 6.
The biggest advantage of this approach compared to Atomic Deck is that you can use any playing cards you want instead of the gimmicked deck. The spectator can also deal out the cards. I believe that using a website to generate randomness is less “weird” than the statistic study website but it may not be a big deal for you. I’m aware that there’s an alternative presentation using a notes app but I don’t really love that route either because every competant magician should be able to remember a card and number. The Atomic Deck team is reportedly building other apps so maybe there will be a better solution in the future.
The disadvantages to this is that you need 6 decks and can’t display the deck before the trick begins. It’s not a big problem to do a multiple outs presentation like “check the inside of my jacket pocket and make sure there is only one deck of cards present.” You also need to do a bit of mental math but this should be quite accessible to most people. There’s the question of what if the spectator keeps trying to generate numbers which I don’t really have a good answer to. I believe most people won’t go too far, especially if the site has a delay in the generation.
The actual big disadvantage is that the website must be accessible to spectators, so there’s not a good way to sell it a commercial product. Sure I could hide the stacks but given enough time its trivially easy to figure out from the website.
I can’t really afford to have the website made at this time so this idea will remain theoretical for now. There’s lots of other great ACAANs on the market and in my opinion ACAAN is an effect that’s worth putting in the extra effort to learn the strongest version.