By Dan & Dave Buck
Our life is a sequence of epiphanies. Come with us as we explore our early history, the rise of cardistry, and the foundation of Art of Play.
Scott Dyer, a celebrated card stacker, constructed the most elaborate house of cards we had ever seen during Cardistry-Con 2019 in Los Angeles. We asked Dyer how high he could go. “Give me a building high enough and the time, and you will see.” The venue was no more than two stories, so after three days of stacking, a final card was placed on top. It was glorious. For the closing ceremony, we kicked it down.
But even after a heavy blow to its foundation, the tower stood upright, as still as an ancient monument. Perhaps the message was ascending card by card to the tower’s peak, for following this glimpse of eternity, a single card from the top came loose, fluttering to the floor as if rehearsing an ensuing avalanche. And then it happened. Thousands of cards blanketed the floor in a beautiful cascade.
It was our turn to build.
Part 1: House of Cards
One card at a time.
A card flourish is the dexterous manipulation of playing cards. The practice of flourishing, known as cardistry, is the technical, precise, and rhythmic dance with an ordinary deck.
The art of cardistry originates from theatrical displays magicians use to accentuate tricks in performance. Springing the cards like an accordion from hand to hand, fanning an entire deck to display their faces, and spinning a card through the air for a surprising revelation are classic card flourishes that have inspired cardistry.
When we were young, card flourishes were hard to find and rarely practiced. We collected them like treasure by scouring old books on sleight of hand and seeking out master magicians with arcane knowledge of closely guarded techniques. We used those elements to build a foundation for cardistry before it even had a name, inspiring a new style of magic.
We never imagined 52 pieces of pasteboard could change people’s lives. Still, we see it in the eyes of the kids who attend Cardistry-Con, the fervent online communities of collectors who trade rare decks, and the celebrity influencers who travel the globe promoting their custom-designed cards. When we reflect on our own story, playing cards changed our lives and are foundational to nearly everything we do.
Part II: Childhood
We love magic.
We were born on November 6th, 1984, and grew up surrounded by rolling hills, tranquil streams, mountainous vistas, and quaint villages. If it sounds magical, it was. Our childhood home was nestled in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas in Sonora, California—just two hours east of the Bay Area, where our parents had lived before moving away from the city to pursue a quieter lifestyle.
We lived halfway between Yosemite National Park and San Francisco and made frequent day trips to each of them. Both places are grand and majestic, with towering structures that reach for the stars. Mysterious and marvelous, pure and refined, natural and designed, their differences were beside us. This contrast would shape a philosophy that embodies the phenomenon of our twinship: each of us is unique yet identical.
Depending on the occasion, we’d either have lunch at Yosemite’s grand hotel, The Ahwahnee, or Neiman Marcus in the city and then stroll through the valley or shop around Union Square. Our mom often treated us to fancy restaurants. The experience was important to her, using those outings to teach us to appreciate craft and attention to detail. Later, this appreciation would mature into a voracious appetite for art and design.
We browsed high-end stores in the city where the architecture, materials, textures, cleanliness, and order inspired us. This excitement of our senses would echo through the trails of Yosemite Valley, nurturing our respect for the environment and call to adventure. We grew up between these two worlds, dreaming of our place in each.
As children, we played various sports. Our older brother, Justin, taught us how to skateboard, and the three of us were on a snowboard team. Although we were active and loved being outside, this changed as our interest in the art of magic matured.
Our mom managed a restaurant and hired us to bus tables, a job we held throughout high school. Between the two of us, we earned a few hundred dollars a month. Our work experience provided real-world lessons in responsibility and a first-in, last-out ethic. Watching Mom fill nearly every role in the restaurant, from bookkeeping to bartending, showed us what it takes to run a business.
Dad worked in the Bay Area, a two-hour commute from Sonora, so he’d often stay through the week. He sold equipment and raw materials to hardware companies in Silicon Valley, a trade he learned from our uncle before our parents started their business. Sometimes, we’d skip school and go to work with dad, which involved much time in the car listening to oldies radio. We’d marvel at how he could steer with his knee to be on the phone and take notes—a skill we later adapted to practice magic and cardistry in Los Angeles traffic.
We thought we were rich, with new cars in the driveway and home improvements in order, plus talk of a swimming pool. However, things took another turn when our uncle sued our parents for infringement and forced them to close their business. It was messy, and we heard things like, “Never do business with family.” Ironically, we have been in business together for a quarter of a century and are fortunate to bear the fruit of a beautiful partnership. But not without our trials and tribulations.
Our parents did well in setting us up for success. Their resilience and dedication to each other continue to be an inspiring example of how to live. They taught us to be humble, put others first, love unconditionally, and believe anything is possible.
Part III: Flourishing
We are artists with ambition.
Our earliest memory of magic was in Twain Harte, a village just east of Sonora, where a street magician borrowed a cigarette from our dad and pushed it through a quarter, leaving no trace as he removed it. Our mom hired him for our birthday party, but his other act was a disappearing one, and he never showed.
David Copperfield’s TV special 15 Years of Magic was a spectacle of grand illusion and theatrics that introduced us to stage magic. We were 9 when it aired. Our grandparents saw a yearning in us while watching Copperfield, giving us a magic set for Christmas that year. The Marshall Brodien Magic Show kit held our interest as long as any new toy might. Eventually, though, it found a place under Dave’s bed.
Over the next few years, we’d watch The World’s Greatest Magic television specials, introducing us to various branches of magic and the idea of becoming magicians. Then, in 1997, Mom called us into the living room to watch a segment of Maury Povich, where the magician Herbert Becker revealed secrets of magic—illusions like the ones Copperfield performed on television. This peek behind the curtain was a revelation for Dave and made everything possible. The tricks from Brodien’s set were no different than the ones performed by the world’s greatest magicians. Becoming a magician was in our hands, literally.
Like a magician appearing from a cloud of smoke, Dave blew the dust off the old set from under his bed and learned all 101 magic tricks. Over the next few weeks, Dan’s interest in magic ensued, and this new passion became mutual. To say we aspired to be the next Siegfried & Roy wouldn’t have been far off. But by then, a new magician revolutionized magic worldwide and deeply inspired us.
David Blaine changed everything. His raw style transformed people’s perception of magic and redefined the characteristics of a magician. When Blaine pushed a cigarette through a quarter, just like the street performer we had seen do years before, it was a callback to where it all began—the first spark of curiosity. Everything else was an illusion, literally, and magic all of a sudden became real for us, again.
Thanks to Blaine, our worldview of magic shifted from an atmosphere of grand spectacle and a dream of “someday” to here and now. Anything was possible. Blaine showed that magic could happen anywhere using anything, which, in a way, inspired us to see magic in everything.
We joined the International Brotherhood of Magicians, an inner circle of magicians offering community through local meetups, in 1997. Even though the closest chapter, Ring 216, was two hours away in San Jose, Dad always drove us. Ricky Smith was the only other youth member and wore baggy clothes and had a chain wallet—telltale signs that he also skated. Although just a few years older, Ricky was far more advanced than us. He showed us sleight-of-hand card magic and techniques, “moves,” as we call them, that inspired a style of visual magic we would later popularize. He became our mentor, curating the books in our library and the techniques we’d practice.
Ricky introduced us to magicians like Lee Asher and Chris Kenner, whose publications set a course for our direction in magic. Both Asher and Kenner had disrupted the community with publications of out-of-the-box thinking, inspiring a generation of magicians to deconstruct classic techniques with stylistic alteration. We quickly adopted their visual style of magic, accentuating techniques for a dramatic effect. It wasn’t too different from skateboard tricks. The difference defined a new era of card magic performed with little to no patter–the obtrusive talk that goes along with a trick. The card magic that attracted us was an acrobatic display of dexterity, bewilderment, and surprise. It was fast and flashy, something better suited for the shorter attention spans inherent to the times. And because the skill was transparent, it was accessible to new generations of magicians inspired by Blaine rather than the antiquated prestige of magic.
Chris Kenner’s “Sybil,” from his book Totally Out of Control, acted as the foundational flourish that inspired cardistry. Exploding from the hands, an array of packets dance between the fingers. When Ricky first performed “Sybil” for us, it was more astonishing than any card trick we had seen before. It changed everything. Freeing us from the confines of traditional magic (specifically the structure of an effect, i.e., losing a chosen card in the deck and then finding it under seemingly impossible conditions) inspired us to explore a new type of magic: demonstrations of unbelievable skill.
In 1999, we attended our first magic convention in Sacramento, California. The Convention at the Capital brought together a group of magicians that would continue to inspire us for years to come: Lee Asher, Joey Burton, Jason England, Aaron Fisher, Bill Goodwin, Lennart Green, Brian Tudor, Gregory Wilson, and R. Paul Wilson, to name several. Having been so influenced by Asher, we were excited to meet him. It was an instant friendship. As we watched him sell his lecture notes out of his backpack in the convention lobby, a practice not exactly condoned by the convention organizers, we were inspired to make our first instructional booklet the following year and sold them similarly. It began our entrepreneurial path and afforded us the means to attend several conventions yearly.
As we traveled around the country, we followed Ricky Smith, attending all the conventions on his list, like SAM in New York, TOAM in Texas, and PCAM in Oregon. We’d be there if his favorite magician, John Carney, were on the bill. Before long, magicians around the world approached us as we fidgeted with cards, “You must be the Buck twins?” We were making a name for ourselves. As more people heard about us, we sold more instructional materials, like booklets and videotapes, out of our backpacks. And with Ricky Smith at our side, we were a fearsome threesome.
Ricky, an ardent student, well-read, extremely polite, and hilarious to boot, can handle cards like no other. The cards appear weightless in his hands, a level of dexterity conjuring a mesmerizing rhythm. Ricky’s mentorship and distinguished technique influenced an economy of motion that became our trademark style. We joke that Ricky is the founder of the Buck Twins, and it’s funny because it’s true.
We made our first website in 2000 as an assignment for a computer science class in high school and advertised in magazines for magicians. We’d get checks in the mail from authors and magicians whose books we had on our shelves. It was surreal. Our following grew as we continued to publish new manuscripts. Our brand name, Dan & Dave, was gaining worldwide recognition.
In 2001, we showcased our card artistry at MAGIC magazine’s tenth-anniversary bash in Las Vegas, performing alongside our magic heroes, Paul Gertner, Chad Long, Guy Hollingworth, Bill Malone, and David Williamson. Set to The Chemical Brothers’ “Block Rockin’ Beats,” we dueled side-by-side for several minutes, escalating the complexity of our flourish routines from elegant fans and one-handed shuffles to multi-packet structures. This was the first time “cardistry” had a stage.
As we neared the crescendo, we began building upon each other’s flourishes, working together in a series of impossible shuffles, one after the other. As we stood in gratitude of a standing ovation, we spread the cards across the table to show they were back in new deck order–an impossible scenario after all the shuffling. It was magic, after all.
David Blaine was in the audience, and after the show, he shook our hands and commended our act. He took our phone number and told us he had an idea for a television special involving the two of us and that we were the future of magic.
Blaine did call us. We were only 17, so when Mom handed us the phone and said David Blaine was on the line, we acted cool, like, Oh yeah, of course, he’s calling, but deep inside, we were freaking out. Our idol was on the phone. Although we never made it on a television special with Blaine (not yet, anyway), a friendship was born. Over the years, our admiration for him and his work has only expanded, and many of our choices have been in aspiration of the example he leads in the world of magic.
Our performance in Vegas put us front and center as rising stars of magic. Our act, however, created quite a stir from an older generation. They were concerned that magic would deteriorate into showy acts of skill void of wonder. Although the argument was sound in its own right, they were, respectfully, not seeing cardistry’s potential. These magicians focused narrowly on a particular style rather than the future of a new art form.
Countless instances of disruption, like cardistry, have provoked a similar argument. We found magic in manipulating playing cards with great skill. And this skill was about to take us around the world.
It was late 2002, during our first semester of college, when The International Magic Convention in London, England, invited us to lecture. It was our first time teaching in front of an audience, and we enjoyed it so much that we pursued other opportunities, mostly overseas. For the next ten years, lecturing allowed us to see the world and expand our brand internationally. We introduced card flourishes as a new skill art and an exercise for improving dexterity. By breaking down our flourishes step by step, we were learning how to teach the fundamentals of cardistry—tools that could be expanded upon.
We noticed the growing attendance at these conventions was increasingly comprised of younger people who had no interest in magic and solely practiced card flourishes. After our lectures, we’d meet these future cardists at restaurants and jam for hours. This was the dawn of a new art form and the worldwide community that is cardistry.
Part IV: Education
We are students. We are teachers.
As teenagers, The Matrix film exposed us to a new world of possibility and overwhelmed us with fantasy, just like David Copperfield did when we were kids. The Wachowskis created a spectacle beyond our imagination, and it was everything we sought. We deconstructed the film as a series of illusions achieved through techniques. In a way, it was like the choreography we were doing with magic, and it led to a revelation: we wanted to make movies.
Like magic, we became obsessed with filmmaking. We moved to southern California and took filmmaking classes at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. Our new friend, Brad Fulton, had just graduated from USC Film School and persuaded us to earn enough credits to apply.
Meanwhile, we spent much time in Las Vegas with our friend Chris Kenner. Chris not only influenced our obsession with flourishes when we first learned “Five Faces of Sybil” from his book, Totally Out of Control, but he is also the executive producer for David Copperfield—a position that demands genius. Whereas Chris recognized our talent and passion, we admired his wisdom and style. Two aspiring filmmakers with unbound potential and the visionary producer of magic’s greatest act. We couldn’t have imagined a better mentor.
Although Chris had all the equipment to make movies, he often told us that filmmaking wasn’t about expensive gear or formal education. Anyone could make a great film with a simple camera. This mentality motivated us to experiment with minute-long movies. We started filming our card flourishes, which inspired The System. Chris and his right-hand man, Homer Liwag, helped us produce the project. The experience was like a filmmaking boot camp, proving we could make movies, or at least an instructional DVD, on our own.
The System focused exclusively on cardistry. It was unlike anything ever produced before, offered fun short films, and a method for teaching cardistry that embraced the technology available on DVD. For example, viewers could toggle between angles and playback speed while watching a flourish. The project sold well and introduced cardistry to magicians around the world.
After a few years of earning credits for transfer to USC Film School, we applied with exceptional grades and referral letters from famous magicians. The school denied us. Although briefly upset by the outcome, we never lost sight of our potential.
Shortly after, Cathy Daly, another colleague of Kenner’s, invited us to live rent-free at her investment property in North Las Vegas. The experience allowed us to dedicate time to our next project, our magnum opus.
We had become close with Cathy; she became a good friend like Chris. They introduced us to Apple and gifted us our first Macs–secondhand, but more than we ever had. They became our mentors and taught us the basics of Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Illustrator, and Photoshop—the tools we’d use to build our companies. Since Chris and Cathy worked for David Copperfield, we often found ourselves backstage, where they’d put us to work on various projects. As unofficial interns, we’d hone our skills in graphic design, helping with marketing materials for Copperfield’s chain of private islands in the Bahamas or his secret warehouse and museum in Las Vegas.
By 2006, a few years had passed since The System. We were ready for a follow-up release. The project we imagined would encompass a body of work ten years in the making—a “best of” presented across three volumes. We turned Cathy’s garage into our studio. It was a monumental project that took over a year to film and edit. The Trilogy is an anthology of tricks, flourishes, and everything else we had dreamt up with a deck of cards. And it sold beyond our wildest dreams.
After treating our family to a dream vacation in Hawaii, we purchased a luxury condo in Hollywood. We filled the cabinets in our kitchen with playing cards. Our home also became our studio as our new venture producing DVDs for other magicians took off. We made hundreds of videos for the most celebrated magicians in the world—magicians like Guy Hollingworth, Chad Nelson, and Juan Tamariz—and built a catalog of unrivaled magic at the time.
Part V: Enterprise
We are entrepreneurs.
Lee Asher was the first to tell us about the Gambler’s General Store, a downtown Las Vegas gift shop with the world’s largest selection of playing cards. We first visited Gambler’s, as we called it, in the spring of 2000 while attending the World Magic Seminar. An aisle with rows of cards from every casino on the strip lured us deeper into the store. We never imagined such variety and began to fill two baskets with decks from various manufacturers offering different designs, stocks, and finishes.
Inspired by what he saw in Vegas, Dave outlined the future of playing card designs for his high school senior project. At that time, only a handful of decks were marketed to magicians; standard drugstore playing cards like Bicycle and Bee brand cards didn’t appeal to us or our evolving style of visual magic. Inspired by the variety offered at the Gambler’s General Store, the presentation showed examples of designer decks that might appeal to magicians and collectors alike. These were the earliest decks we ever designed. Most were fictitious collaborations with luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Gucci. But one of them—an adaptation of a Charles & Ray Eames’ pattern—came to fruition two decades later. From this, a new era of playing cards was proposed, a vision that would manifest Art of Play.
Sidebar
We developed a regimen for testing the quality of playing cards—idiosyncrasies of a playing card snob. Out of the box, were the edges smooth? If not, the blades that cut them were dull. We’d remedy this by rubbing each edge against our jeans several times. This smooths a rough edge that feels like sandpaper and may extend the deck’s life by sealing an exposed edge from moisture. It also improves fanning.
Next, we’d begin a sequence of shuffles, fans, and flourishes that would test the flexibility and elasticity of the cards, as well as how well they fanned and faroed. Their resilience depended on how quickly and effortlessly they sprang back to shape. If they creased easily, they were unusable. If they didn’t fan, they lacked a quality finish. If they didn’t faro, a type of shuffle that perfectly weaves the cards together, then issues were profuse, and we’d use them to practice tricks that required tearing the cards.
Our favorites were “Steamboat,” a thin, smooth-finish borderless deck suitable for table work, like cheating techniques such as false deals, blind shuffles and card mucking, as well as “Tally-Ho Circle Backs” with a linen finish, which were unrivaled at the time.
Blaine’s “Split Spades” playing cards, released in 2006, inspired us to make our cards, the “Smoke & Mirrors.” In 2008, we commissioned Si Scott to design the cards and embraced his style over tradition. Since our business producing DVDs was thriving, our intent for “Smoke & Mirrors” was to make a custom deck for us to use in our videos and sell a few on the side. We never imagined them as a mainstay of a playing card company. As we released follow-up editions, they became exceedingly popular. They sold out in a single day when we released the fourth edition in 2010 (the first color edition with a simplified back design). The following year, we printed 30,000 decks for the sixth edition, triple the amount we had ever printed before, and they sold out in mere seconds. “Smoke & Mirrors” have since become a brand name among cardists, with over a half million decks as of 2023.
After the success of “Smoke & Mirrors” and their subsequent editions, we started producing other decks and experimenting with new features and different styles. In 2009, we reintroduced a set of plaid cards from the turn of the 20th century and marketed them as cards suitable for the outdoors, appealing to a lifestyle of adventure that we embraced. For us, cards were more than apparatus, they represented individuality. We began collaborating with artists and designers to expand on this idea, offering them a blank canvas with the creative freedom to explore what’s possible with the medium.
Sveta Dorosheva illustrated our “Fantastique” playing cards, a surreal design inspired by the golden age of magic. When the cards are riffled at either end, they animate, like a flip-book. Ben Newman created our “PRIME” playing cards, the first fully custom deck we produced, featuring an original lineup of suits and face cards. By honoring these creators with a byline on the packaging, they are personally connected to the project, which we believe inspires more meaningful work.
The “Smoke & Mirrors” deluxe box set in 2012 was intended to be a grand finale for the series (though we later revived the design for a collaboration with Anyone Worldwide in 2020). With the 2012 edition, we premiered thin borders—a design detail that accentuates fans and spreads. It required printing outside the recommended safety zones, the printable area on a card, but we did it anyway. These cards were also the first to have a perforated seal, which requires hand assembly as their placement must be exact. This detail allowed for an extra layer of inspection and became a level of quality control unmatched by others. Decks with even the slightest ding get set aside.
Following this, we worked on a unique deck with Guy Hollingworth, a prominent card magician from London whose DVD anthology we were also producing. He requested that the cards be thin, like STUD playing cards, a Walgreens brand of cards that had been discontinued. Both the paper and equipment that made them were obsolete, so we challenged the United States Playing Card Company to recreate a similar stock. It would require crushing the paper through a hydraulic press at a tension they felt uncomfortable with. We agreed to accept liability if their equipment failed and the cards didn’t turn out. We were in no place financially to cover equipment repair costs, but our focus was on thin cards for Hollingworth, which worked. Since then, nearly all of our decks have been crushed. The USPCC went on to trademark the service and charge a premium for it. Nowadays, thin borders, crushed stock, and perforated seals are standard features.
Excluding the phenomenal success of “Smoke & Mirrors,” playing cards were out-selling our catalog of magic videos and apparatus tenfold. As more players entered the arena, the variety of cards available attracted new collectors outside of magic and cardistry. Still, these were traditional cards, and we wondered what else we could do with the medium. We approached our favorite design studio, Stranger & Stranger, with an idea. To our surprise, they were into it. So, on December 12, 2012, we released the “Ultimate Deck,” which was inspired by transformation playing cards—a particular type of deck where the suits on each card are features of a whimsical illustration. The cards were unlike anything produced then and went viral, garnering mainstream attention from popular blogs worldwide. They’ve been a bestseller ever since.
This momentum inspired us to create Art of Play, the first online shop dedicated to premium playing cards. We launched on August 12, 2013, with a curated collection of nearly 100 decks.
We expected Art of Play to be an instant success, but sales in the first year proved otherwise. If it wasn’t for the positive feedback, we might have closed its doors. We kept at it, adding new decks to the catalog and promoting on social media. As we built a following on Instagram, sales improved. In 2015, we invited our friend Adam Rubin, a fellow magician and avid fan of mechanical puzzles, to spearhead growth in this domain. Within a few years, we became the premier shop for not only playing cards but also mechanical puzzles.
In 2017, the three of us reimagined the future of Art of Play as a modern wonder emporium and expanded our catalog to include games, toys, and home goods, boldly dominating the playing cards we offered.
Although playing cards continue to be the cynosure of our brand, we love exploring new possibilities. It is the eclectic range of curiosities we curate that inspire us.
By exploring what is possible with a deck of cards, while sharing our art with the world, we cultivated a worldwide community of cardists and collectors. We humbly influenced a marketplace for premium designer playing cards and are grateful to see it thrive.
The imaginary Eames collaboration from high school became a dream project and a personal challenge to realize. After launching Art of Play, we contacted the organization that manages the Eames legacy about making the cards. There was no response. Still, we tried for years, always thoughtful in our attempts. We never gave up. Then, in 2020, nearly two decades after Dave’s initial design for his high school senior project, we landed a deal with the Eames Office to produce a series of playing cards in the spirit of Charles & Ray Eames. This time, it was Dan who spearheaded the design. The series introduces innovative designs that are both playful and practical for card games, magic, and cardistry.
Part VI: Wonder
Epiphanies await the curious mind.
When we were kids, we loved playing the cloud game with our grandmother, whom we called Ama. It was an exercise in recognizing the extraordinary—like a fire-breathing dragon—in something as ordinary as a cloud. Ama, the ringmaster of this mysterious circus in the sky, would challenge us to spot as many wondrous shapes as we could. Each time, we never knew what might appear, and perhaps that’s the secret to living a wonder-filled life.
Like the endless formations of clouds, playing cards present incomprehensible possibilities—according to popular estimations, there are more ways to arrange a deck of cards than atoms in the universe. Each shuffle brings a new discovery. We never foresaw the impact of The Trilogy or how cardistry would evolve into a global community. Our journey wasn’t solely due to hard work or determination. There’s a magic beyond that—an enchantment found in embracing the unknown.
If we’ve learned anything, it’s that being a master of a craft is not the same as being a master thinker. Leonardo da Vinci described in his journals that to be a master thinker, you must master the art of discovering the world around you. In essence, this is the art of play.
Ama left us with the ability to see the magic in everything. Following her lead, we envisioned Art of Play—a wonder emporium where the extraordinary meets the everyday, where curiosity reigns, and surprises are always just around the corner. It’s a place where the doors are open to all, and where imagination can run wild.
World of Illusions 