Barry's Best Marked Decks (Yes, It Is Cheating. Do It Anyway.)

Every professional you admire owns at least one marked deck. Not one of them will tell you which one, and I have decided I am done protecting them.

There is a particular kind of magician who gets funny about marked cards. You will meet him at a convention bar, usually holding a drink he did not pay for, and he will explain that marked decks are a crutch, that real card magic is done with the hands, and that anyone who needs to read a back design should take up the recorder instead. He will say all of this while carrying a marked deck in his left jacket pocket. I know this because I have checked.

So let us be adults about it. A marked deck does one thing: it removes the single most fragile moment in card magic, which is the bit where you have to know something you have no honest way of knowing. It does not do the trick for you. It does not fix your presentation, your patter, or the fact that you keep saying "is this your card" like a question rather than a statement. It just removes one point of failure, permanently, for about the price of two pints.

The category has also improved considerably since the days when a marked deck meant squinting at a smudge that a spectator could spot from across a room. The marking systems are better, the card stock is better, and several of these are cheap enough that you can carry one as your everyday deck instead of hoarding it like a war relic. Here are the six worth your money, ranked by nothing in particular except my patience.

My Power Deck (Red) by Jordan Victoria

Eight pounds and forty nine pence. At that price I expected a code system requiring a decoder card and a quiet room, and instead Jordan Victoria has produced a direct read deck where you look at the back and you simply know what it is. No counting, no arithmetic, no small pause while you work out that three notches means a seven. The marks are readable at about a metre and a half, which is further than any spectator will ever be from you and considerably further than most of them should be.

The point of this deck is not the marking system, though. The point is the price. Most magicians buy an expensive marked deck, decide it is too precious for ordinary use, and keep it in a drawer for the special occasion that never arrives. At this price you can have cards signed, torn, folded and posted through a letterbox without wincing. The mark itself also creates an asymmetry in the back design, which opens up one way deck work you would otherwise need a separate deck for. Buy two. Use them. Stop treating cards like heirlooms.

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If you have never owned a marked deck, this is where I would start you, on the grounds that the biggest obstacle to using one is psychological rather than technical. You need to get used to glancing rather than staring, and you will do that faster with a deck you are not frightened of damaging.

GT Speedreader Marked Deck (Bicycle 809 Mandolin Red)

This one is printed on a Bicycle 809 Mandolin back, which matters more than it sounds like it should. A significant number of spectators have a vague sense of what a deck of cards is supposed to look like, and that sense is shaped entirely by Bicycle. Hand them a custom deck with a gothic back design and a foil tuck case and some part of their brain files it under "trick cards" before you have done anything at all. Hand them this and their brain files it under "cards".

The marking system is based on Ted Lesley's work, it is designed to be read instantly with no code, and it is concealed well enough that the marks vanish when the deck is spread. It is also, and this is the part I appreciate, designed to survive the specific way spectators actually examine cards, which is to say badly and in the wrong places. It comes with a free online download of The Trick That Can't Be Explained. It is designed for right handed performers, so if you are left handed, skip to the Phoenix.

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DMC Elites Pro-Tier Portcullis

DMC Elites have been the default answer to "which marked deck" for long enough that I had assumed the range had stopped improving and started coasting. The V7 Pro-Tier edition is annoyingly not that. The marking system is more discreet than previous versions, which is a trade I would normally warn you about, because discreet usually means harder to read at speed. Here it does not. It means harder to find if someone is looking for it, which is a different thing entirely and a considerably more useful one.

Soft crushed finish, oxblood red tuck case, and a blank faced card and a double backer included in every deck, which quietly turns a marked deck into a marked deck plus two gimmicks you were probably going to buy separately. At twelve ninety nine this is the best value on this list by a distance, and I have spent some time trying to find something to complain about. The tuck case is a bit much. That is what I have got.

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The DMC and GT decks solve the same problem in opposite directions. GT gives you a deck that looks utterly ordinary to a spectator. DMC gives you a deck that looks like a nice deck of custom cards, which is its own kind of cover, because nobody suspects the person who is obviously a card enthusiast of also being a cheat. Pick according to which lie you find easier to tell.

Elysian Duets Marked Deck (Red) by Phill Smith

This is the one that made me sit up, and I resent it. Phill Smith's Optical Marking System marks all four corners, which is standard enough. What is not standard is that it also marks the Mnemonica stack position, and the cards immediately above and below in the stack. Read that again if you need to. The deck tells you where you are in a memorised stack without you having memorised the stack. Twenty years of magicians grinding through Mnemonica flashcards on the commute, and this deck simply hands you the answer for nineteen pounds.

It also has a one way back, one way faces, an included double backer, a Joker reveal card, and a link to full online instructions. I want to be clear that memorising the stack properly is still better, because the deck cannot tell you what you cannot see, and there are moments in a routine where you need to know the answer with the deck squared and in someone else's hands. But for anyone doing mentalism where the stack is a tool rather than a religion, this is a shortcut I cannot honestly argue against.

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Phoenix Marked Deck (Red)

The Phoenix deck was designed as a marked deck first and then had the markings removed to make the standard version, which is the correct order to do this in and almost nobody does. The result is that the marks sit exactly where they should rather than wherever the existing back design left room. Every corner is marked, in both directions, so the faintest opening of a fan in either hand gives you the value. If you are left handed and have spent your career quietly accepting decks designed for someone else, this is the one.

The markings use Ted Lesley's approach and they are big, which sounds like a problem and is not, because they are integrated into the back design rather than dropped on top of it. Twenty pounds is more than the DMC and it does less on paper. What it does is behave like a completely normal deck of good cards that happens to be marked everywhere, forever, in every orientation, which is exactly what you want from something you intend to use for the next two hundred performances. Boring. Reliable. Correct.

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Flight Deck by Steve Gore

Everything else on this list tells you what a card is. This tells you where it is. Flight Deck is an edge marking system built into a bordered deck, developed out of the old GPS Deck, and every card is marked for suit and value along the side. A glance at the edge of a squared deck tells you the position of the cards inside it. Which means you can have a deck genuinely shuffled by a spectator, take it back, look at it for slightly less than a second, and know where their card went.

The system is spread across two sides rather than one, which makes it far less awkward in the hands than early edge marked decks were. Printed on UltraLux stock with AquaFlow coating, traditionally cut, custom artwork throughout, and it comes with a full tutorial from Steve Gore covering a card at number, a sandwich routine, and the actual mechanics of edge work. This is the hardest deck here to learn and the most useful once you have. It is also the one most likely to sit unused, because learning it requires effort and most people reading this will not make any.

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A note on the thing nobody tells you: owning a marked deck changes what you practise. You stop drilling controls you no longer need and start thinking about why the audience should care, which is the harder problem and the one most card magicians avoid for their entire careers. If you want somewhere to point that new free attention, our guide to the best card magic tricks to learn is a reasonable place to start, and the self working tricks guide covers effects where method has never been the limiting factor.

I started this piece intending to explain that marked decks are for people who cannot be bothered to learn a proper double lift. Then I remembered that I have used one at almost every paid job I have done since about 2009, that it has never once been noticed, and that pretending otherwise in print would be exactly the sort of dishonesty I complain about in other people. So there it is. They work. Buy one. Do not tell the man at the convention bar that I sent you, because he already knows, and he is lying to you.