The magician spreads a deck of cards and invites the audience to freely think of any card. Attempting to capture the memory from the spectator's mind, the magician selects a card, flips it over, and places it back into the deck. When the cards are spread again, the spectator's card seems to have vanished from the face-up spread, leaving the face-down card as the thought of one.



With a snap, the magician reveals that it is all an illusion. The face-down card turns out to be blank, and the entire deck becomes blank as well. The thought-of card was never in the deck—it has been elsewhere all along—perhaps in a wallet, under a mat, in a pocket, or even on the spectator’s chair.