Phone

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.

Inject 2 is an app that lets you do various effects with a spectator’s phone. Its been having a bunch of issues since December of 2024. I don’t have the app largely because I don’t really trust myself not to drop a spectator’s phone and be left with a repair bill. I’ve never really leaned into the borrowed aspect of magic. I don’t like touching other people’s stuff.

Apps and software are fairly new in the grand scheme of things and its pretty interesting to hear all the discussion surrounding longevity. No one expects an apple to last years but you’d be upset if your brand new car rusts in a week. There’s a lot of debate about the ethics of preserving digital data and how much work companies should be required to do. The Stop Killing Games movement was started around August last year. Games are increasingly becoming online only and when the game developer shuts down the server, people will no longer be able to play. This also relates to important questions over software ownership which is another huge contentious topic.