My Favorite Card Tricks: Morgan and West

We asked some of magic's greatest minds to share with us their favorite card tricks. This week is the turn of Morgan and West. You may know them from their DVD Decoded. Over to Morgan and West:

This is a funny one for us as the top three card effects that we perform the most are, perfectly honestly, part of our stage shows. As a result this isn't going to be exactly what many of you would expect from a card trick. But that's the beauty of magic, as long as it's 'impossible' then it can be whatever it wants to be... So in a very particular order (from 3rd place to 1st place) here we go:

3. Misdirection Card Trick (MCT), From our show Time Travelling Magicians and we've also performed it on Television with Paloma Faith as our assistant. Not that we usually use assistants. It was an odd day. It was inspired by Penn & Teller's Cell Fish routine and is all about letting the audience think that they know what is happening, when of course nothing could be further from the truth.

2. Mr West presents an amazing, death defying, underwater card trick with 100 decks of cards using only his face because his hands are tied behind his back. As the title suggests it's a bit silly, uses literally thousands of cards which are tipped all over Mr West and is, by and large, a card to impossible location that will play for a theatre full of people with no problems at all. It lasts 13 minutes.

1. Thought of Card Across. Our very own riff on the classic Cards Across plot. Ten red cards, ten black. Counted out freely and openly. Someone thinks of one of the black cards and then nothing is done. No click of the fingers, no magic words, not even a wiggle of the nose. Then the cards are counted again and there are now only nine black but 11 in the red pile! The volunteer sees that their black card has vanished and only then names it out loud. It is, of course, found to be the eleventh card amongst the reds. A miracle.