For the first year of my walk-around performing career, my close-up set was almost entirely cards. This made perfect sense to me at the time. Cards were how I had entered magic — buying my first deck and downloading tutorials from ellusionist.com, practicing alone in hotel rooms during those two hundred nights a year on the road. Cards were what I knew. Cards were what I was comfortable with. Cards were my identity as a performer.
My typical walk-around set at a corporate event in Vienna or Graz went something like this: a card effect to open, a different card effect as a follow-up, a third card effect as a closer, and maybe — if the group was still engaged — a fourth card effect as an encore. Four tricks, one prop. Clean and simple.
Except it was not working.
Not in the sense that the tricks failed. The individual effects were solid. My technique had reached a level where I could perform reliably under pressure. The effects I had chosen were strong, tested pieces that got good reactions. Taken one at a time, there was nothing wrong with any of them.
The problem was what happened across the evening, across multiple tables, when a room full of corporate guests experienced my walk-around set as a whole. And that problem took me embarrassingly long to identify.
The Pattern I Could Not See
After performing at a product launch event in Salzburg — one of those evening functions where I was hired to mingle and perform during the cocktail reception — the event organizer pulled me aside. She was perfectly kind about it, which made what she said more painful rather than less.
“The magic was great,” she said. “But a few people mentioned it was a lot of card tricks.”
I wanted to argue. These were not the same card trick. They were completely different effects with different presentations, different plots, different emotional beats. One was visual, one was mentalism-adjacent, one was a prediction, one involved audience participation. To me, they were as different from each other as a symphony is from a rock song.
To the audience, they were all “card tricks.”
This was humbling, and it was one of those moments where the consultant in me — the strategy brain that I bring to everything — finally switched on and started analyzing the situation objectively rather than defensively.
The Audience’s Perspective vs. the Performer’s Perspective
When I perform a card effect, I am deeply aware of the differences between effects. I know which ones use different methods, different presentations, different principles. I appreciate the variety because I understand the craft at a granular level.
The audience sees none of this. What they see is a man with a deck of cards. Again. Every time he comes to a table, he has a deck of cards. He does something with the cards. It is impressive. He moves to the next table. He has a deck of cards. He does something else with the cards. It is impressive. He moves to the next table. Cards again.
By the third table, the surrounding guests — the ones who have seen me work other groups — are already calibrated. “Oh, the card guy is coming over.” The element of surprise is gone before I open my mouth. They know what category of experience they are about to have, and that foreknowledge diminishes the impact even if the specific effect is something they have never seen.
Ken Weber’s concept of variety as essential to entertainment hit me hard when I read Maximum Entertainment. He argues that audiences need textural change — shifts in what they are seeing, what kind of object is being used, what kind of impossibility is being presented. A show that is entirely one type of effect, no matter how good each individual effect is, becomes monotonous. The audience stops being surprised by the category even if they are still surprised by the specific outcome.
This was exactly what was happening in my walk-around sets.
The Variety Experiment
I decided to rebuild my walk-around repertoire from scratch, with one constraint: no two effects at the same table could use the same prop or the same type of object.
This was terrifying, because it meant stepping away from my comfort zone — cards — and learning to perform with objects I was far less practiced with. Coins, borrowed items, rubber bands, pens, business cards, sugar packets, whatever happened to be on the table. Each of these required a different set of skills, a different kind of practice, a different performance energy.
The first few events with the new approach were rough. I was less confident with the non-card material. My timing was off. My hands did not have the automatic, unthinking fluency that thousands of hours of card practice had given me. I felt like a beginner again, and the audience could sense my uncertainty.
But something interesting happened almost immediately. The audience experience improved.
Even though my individual performances were technically weaker — I was still learning some of this material — the overall impression of the evening was stronger. Groups were surprised each time I approached, because they could not predict what was coming. “Oh, he’s doing something with a coin now.” “Wait, he just used her ring.” “This time it’s a piece of paper.” Each encounter felt fresh, even to guests who had watched me work other tables.
The variety created an impression of range, of depth, of a performer who could do anything rather than a performer who had one very good skill.
What I Kept and What I Cut
I did not abandon cards entirely. That would have been foolish — card magic is still my strongest suit, the area where my technique is most reliable and my confidence is highest. What I did was limit myself to one card effect per table, maximum. And I made sure it was surrounded by effects using different objects and different premises.
My current walk-around structure for a typical corporate event looks something like this. I approach a table and open with something that uses a borrowed object — a ring, a phone, a bill from someone’s wallet. This immediately establishes that the magic is personal and involves their stuff, not my props. The second effect might use a coin, or something from the table, or something visual and prop-free. Only then, if the group is engaged and the moment is right, do I bring out the cards for a single, strong piece. By this point, the cards feel like a change of pace rather than a repetition of what they have already seen or heard about from other tables.
Some nights I do not use cards at all. This would have been unthinkable to me two years ago. Cards were my identity. Without cards, I was not sure who I was as a performer. But the freedom of performing without them — the challenge of creating impossible moments using whatever is available — has pushed me to grow in ways that another decade of card practice never would have.
The Borrowed Object Advantage
One of the most significant improvements in my walk-around work has come from the shift toward borrowed objects. When I use someone’s wedding ring, or their signed business card, or a bill from their wallet, the magic becomes inherently more personal and more impossible.
The logic from the spectator’s perspective is simple: I could not have prepared for this specific object. I did not know this person would be here. I did not know they would be wearing that ring. The impossibility is grounded in the uniqueness of the object, and that grounding makes the magic feel more real than anything I could achieve with my own deck of cards, which the spectator knows I carry everywhere and which, for all they know, might be specially prepared.
This connects to something I first encountered in my reading — the idea that the best close-up magic happens when there is nowhere to hide. When the magic occurs with a borrowed object, at arm’s length, in the spectator’s own hands, the impossibility is maximized because every possible explanation is eliminated by the conditions.
Cards, by their nature, carry suspicion. Everyone has a vague sense that card tricks involve special decks, hidden cards, or marked backs. This suspicion is often unfounded, but it exists in the spectator’s mind and it reduces the impact of even the cleanest card work. Borrowed objects carry no such suspicion. A wedding ring is a wedding ring. There is no question about its legitimacy. When something impossible happens with it, the impossibility is unqualified.
The Identity Question
Stepping away from a card-heavy approach forced me to confront an uncomfortable question: who was I as a performer if not “the card guy”?
This turned out to be one of the most productive identity crises I have experienced. As long as my performing identity was tied to a specific prop, I was limited by that prop’s constraints. Cards are rectangular, uniform, and numerous. They enable certain types of effects and preclude others. By expanding my repertoire beyond cards, I was forced to think about what I actually wanted to communicate as a performer, independent of any specific tool.
The answer, I eventually realized, was that I wanted to create moments of genuine impossibility in the most intimate possible setting. The tool did not matter. The moment mattered. The connection mattered. The spectator’s experience mattered.
Cards could serve that purpose. So could coins, rings, pens, napkins, sugar packets, and empty hands. The moment I stopped identifying with the tool and started identifying with the experience I was creating, my walk-around work transformed.
What I Would Tell My Earlier Self
If I could go back to those early card-heavy walk-around sets, I would tell myself three things.
First: your audience does not see the differences you see. What feels like enormous variety to you — different card effects with different plots and different methods — registers as “more card tricks” to them. Variety must be visible and obvious, not subtle and technical.
Second: discomfort is a sign that you are growing. The anxiety of performing with unfamiliar objects, the awkwardness of learning new material, the vulnerability of not being the best version of yourself — these are the feelings that precede improvement. The comfortable card set was a plateau disguised as a peak.
Third: your props are not your identity. You are not the card guy. You are the guy who creates impossible moments between human beings. The cards were just where you started. They do not have to be where you stay.
I still love cards. I still practice card work in hotel rooms. I still think a well-executed card effect is one of the most beautiful things in close-up magic. But my walk-around sets are no longer a card recital. They are a conversation between impossibility and the everyday objects that populate the spectator’s world.
The audience noticed the difference before I did. That event organizer in Salzburg was right. It was a lot of card tricks. And admitting that — really hearing it, without defensiveness — was the beginning of becoming a better close-up performer.