The Trainer Deck by Thom Parkin
A tool to help you easily and quickly master the Aronson or Tamariz stack
Unlock your ability to perform astounding card magic with a memorized deck!
Like most of the arts, card magic is never static. There are new developments and discoveries, as a result of innovation and creativity. And there are trends that come and go. It's safe to say that one of the trends in card magic over the last decade or two is a revival of interest in using memorized stacks. Card magic that uses a "mem-deck", as it's often referred to affectionately, is so powerful that the effects will seem completely mind-blowing and impossible even to magicians who are unfamiliar with this amazing tool.
Stacks have been used in card magic for a long time, but many of them - like the Si Stebbins stack or Eight Kings stack - rely on recurring patterns, which makes them easy to remember, but also increases the likelihood of them being discovered, and also requires some mental gymnastics any time you are working with the stack. So what if there was a way to have a stack that didn't look anything like a stack, and could be openly shown to spectators without any fear of detection? And where you didn't need to use any formulae or do any mental calculations? Suppose you could easily know the location and identity of any card in the deck?
Enter Simon Aronson, who is considered one of the pioneers in this area, and first brought his Aronson Stack to magicians in his book A Stack to Remember in 1979. Then bring in Spanish magician Juan Tamariz, widely considered one of the world's greatest living performers of the art of magic. His book Mnemonica first appeared in his native language in 2000 (four years later in an English translation), and is a masterful work that introduced his Tamariz Stack along with numerous brilliant applications of it.
Is it worth the effort to learn a memorized stack? This is an area of card magic that I've not explored much myself until now, and it certainly isn't the place to begin learning card magic. But it is a place where you can end up, and there are some real treasures and miracles to be found there for the persistent adventurer. Those who dedicate themselves to mastering it will almost certainly return with many rewards. Not only will card magic with a memorized stack completely fool other magicians who are watching your sleight of hand closely, but it also enables you to do what for lay people is on the level of miracles.
But how can one best go about learning what seems to be an entire deck of apparently random cards? Aronson and Tamariz have some suggestions to help us accomplish this, but many magicians are looking for shortcuts that will speed up this process. There are techniques and tools that can help, and arguably none are better than The Trainer Deck from Thom Parkin. This isn't a deck you'll use for performing in any way, but is simply a tool that was developed from the ground up, to help you master the Aronson Stack or the Tamariz Stack, with a separate Trainer Deck available for each.
I first came across Thom from his ingenious creations in a different branch of magic: magic combined with technology. In the real world Thom is a professional software developer, so technology is where he makes his bread and butter, and where he has real expertise. But for Thom it's not just a job, but also one of his loves.
But another of Thom's loves is card magic. So it was a natural fit for him to combine the two, which is what he's done with two great products that I've previously enjoyed immensely and can recommend. Instant Card Magician lets a spectator use their own phone to turn them into a magician, and gives them a script for correctly identifying the exact card that you draw randomly (genuinely random!) from the deck. Even more impressive is Parkin Email Premonition (P.E.P.), which lets you reveal anything (genuinely anything!) via an image or text in an email with a timestamp proving that the email arrived before the selection was made.
With The Trainer Deck, Thom applied his creative skills to a different problem: to come up with a way to help people learn the Aronson Stack or Tamariz Stack in the fastest way possible. People working with these stacks will know that the key thing to remember in order to use a memorized stack is the number in the stack for a card of any value/suit, or to be able to name that value/suit based purely on the number. As anyone familiar with the work of renowned memory expert Harry Lorayne will know, the best way to remember things easily and quickly is by finding a way to associate apparently abstract concepts like numbers with a concrete image.
A tool to help you easily and quickly master the Aronson or Tamariz stack
Unlock your ability to perform astounding card magic with a memorized deck!
Like most of the arts, card magic is never static. There are new developments and discoveries, as a result of innovation and creativity. And there are trends that come and go. It's safe to say that one of the trends in card magic over the last decade or two is a revival of interest in using memorized stacks. Card magic that uses a "mem-deck", as it's often referred to affectionately, is so powerful that the effects will seem completely mind-blowing and impossible even to magicians who are unfamiliar with this amazing tool.
Stacks have been used in card magic for a long time, but many of them - like the Si Stebbins stack or Eight Kings stack - rely on recurring patterns, which makes them easy to remember, but also increases the likelihood of them being discovered, and also requires some mental gymnastics any time you are working with the stack. So what if there was a way to have a stack that didn't look anything like a stack, and could be openly shown to spectators without any fear of detection? And where you didn't need to use any formulae or do any mental calculations? Suppose you could easily know the location and identity of any card in the deck?
Enter Simon Aronson, who is considered one of the pioneers in this area, and first brought his Aronson Stack to magicians in his book A Stack to Remember in 1979. Then bring in Spanish magician Juan Tamariz, widely considered one of the world's greatest living performers of the art of magic. His book Mnemonica first appeared in his native language in 2000 (four years later in an English translation), and is a masterful work that introduced his Tamariz Stack along with numerous brilliant applications of it.
Is it worth the effort to learn a memorized stack? This is an area of card magic that I've not explored much myself until now, and it certainly isn't the place to begin learning card magic. But it is a place where you can end up, and there are some real treasures and miracles to be found there for the persistent adventurer. Those who dedicate themselves to mastering it will almost certainly return with many rewards. Not only will card magic with a memorized stack completely fool other magicians who are watching your sleight of hand closely, but it also enables you to do what for lay people is on the level of miracles.
But how can one best go about learning what seems to be an entire deck of apparently random cards? Aronson and Tamariz have some suggestions to help us accomplish this, but many magicians are looking for shortcuts that will speed up this process. There are techniques and tools that can help, and arguably none are better than The Trainer Deck from Thom Parkin. This isn't a deck you'll use for performing in any way, but is simply a tool that was developed from the ground up, to help you master the Aronson Stack or the Tamariz Stack, with a separate Trainer Deck available for each.
I first came across Thom from his ingenious creations in a different branch of magic: magic combined with technology. In the real world Thom is a professional software developer, so technology is where he makes his bread and butter, and where he has real expertise. But for Thom it's not just a job, but also one of his loves.
But another of Thom's loves is card magic. So it was a natural fit for him to combine the two, which is what he's done with two great products that I've previously enjoyed immensely and can recommend. Instant Card Magician lets a spectator use their own phone to turn them into a magician, and gives them a script for correctly identifying the exact card that you draw randomly (genuinely random!) from the deck. Even more impressive is Parkin Email Premonition (P.E.P.), which lets you reveal anything (genuinely anything!) via an image or text in an email with a timestamp proving that the email arrived before the selection was made.
With The Trainer Deck, Thom applied his creative skills to a different problem: to come up with a way to help people learn the Aronson Stack or Tamariz Stack in the fastest way possible. People working with these stacks will know that the key thing to remember in order to use a memorized stack is the number in the stack for a card of any value/suit, or to be able to name that value/suit based purely on the number. As anyone familiar with the work of renowned memory expert Harry Lorayne will know, the best way to remember things easily and quickly is by finding a way to associate apparently abstract concepts like numbers with a concrete image.
