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Card throwing is the art of throwing standard with great accuracy or force. It is performed both as part of stage magic shows and as a competitive physical feat among magicians, with official records existing for longest distance thrown, fastest speed, highest throw, greatest accuracy, and the greatest number of cards in one minute.
Many magicians commissioned specially printed cards, known as throwing cards, throwouts, scaling cards, or souvenir cards to use for these purposes. Generally, such cards featured the image and name of the magician and often featured optical illusions, mystical images, and text and graphics from other advertisers. Propelled Pasteboards, a blog dedicated to the history of throwing cards and related ephemera, contains examples of hundreds of specially printed throwing cards used by magicians and other performers to advertise their performances.
Today, magicians all over the world use card throwing as parts of their act. Ricky Jay, Rick Smith Jr. and Aditya Kodmur are among the most well-known people to frequently use card throwing during performance.
There are multiple techniques for throwing cards in this manner. The technique often attributed to Alexander Herrmann, and taught in Ricky Jay's book Cards as Weapons (1977), involves gripping the middle of the card horizontally between the thumb and the middle finger, while the index finger rests on the corner of the card nearest the hand and away from the body. The wrist is cocked inward at a 90-degree angle, then flicked briskly outward, propelling the card. For distance and power, the technique adds motion of the forearm bending at the elbow straight outwards from a 90-degree angle simultaneous to the flicking motion of the wrist.
In another method created by Howard Thurston, the card is gripped between the first and second fingers, usually of the left hand, and propelled in a similar manner. There are also variations on both grips and throwing styles, some of which depend on the type of flight the magician is attempting to achieve.
Forceful throws will usually spiral somewhat on the way to the target when thrown at a long distance since most cards are not perfectly flat. With a given deck, the bend of the cards are usually similar enough to each other that this spiral is easily predictable, and a practiced magician can hit very small targets even at many yards away. It is also possible to throw a card very flat at lower speeds to get the card to land in or on top of something.
Many tricks done with thrown cards are designed to not only impress with the magician's dexterity but work on a common theme in stage magic: the illusion of danger. While the illusion of danger can be achieved by outright deception, another method is to play on people's popular misconceptions. In the case of card throwing, the magician achieves this effect by throwing the card at fragile targets such as newspaper, cigarettes, fruit, hot dogs, foam, or any other substance that the card will easily imbed in or break. While none of these objects act like human tissue in terms of wound ballistics, the magician is counting on most audience members thinking they actually are comparable, and therefore believing he or she has turned a harmless playing card into a deadly projectile.
This myth was tested on the Discovery Channel program MythBusters, and subsequently debunked. Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage was already familiar with the throwing card trick and was shown to be adept at performing it, with his maximum throwing speed being measured at . The episode also featured Ricky Jay himself, who spoke of writing the book and admitted he is most likely responsible for the genesis of the myth. The hosts were able to measure the speed of his throws at about . After failing to throw the cards into a ballistic gelatin target with enough force that would result in injury, they used an electric motor to mechanically launch a card at . Offering his own body as a target, host Jamie Hyneman allowed the launcher to be fired at the exposed skin of his abdomen from a few feet away, which only resulted in a superficial paper cut. The hosts concluded that a playing card does not have sufficient mass to cause lethal damage to human tissue.
The Marvel Comics character Gambit utilises card-throwing as part of his trademark fighting style, utilising playing cards in conjunction with his mutant ability to explosively charge up objects with kinetic energy. The low mass of playing cards allows Gambit to quickly charge them up.
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