Card Magic

Card manipulation (or card magic) is the illusion of magic using a deck of playing cards. Card magic is commonplace in magic performances, especially in close up magic or parlor magic and street magic.
Playing cards became popular with magicians in the last century or so as they were props which were inexpensive, versatile, and easily manipulated. Although magicians have created and presented myriad illusions with cards (sometimes referred to as card tricks), these illusions are generally considered to be built upon perhaps one hundred or so basic principles and techniques. Presentation and context (including patter, the conjurer's misleading self-serving account of what he is doing) account for many of the variations.
Card magic, in one form or another, likely dates from the time playing cards became commonly known — towards the second half of the fourteenth century — but its history in this period is largely undocumented. One may surmise from the practice of how other everyday objects have been pressed into the service of conjurers across cultures and the ages that card magic developed spontaneously and roughly concurrently in different parts of the world, if not always synchronously. However, compared to sleight of hand magic in general and to cups and balls, it is a relatively new form of magic.[citation needed]
Card manipulators performing card fans and other manipulations, which require the individual cards to flow smoothly across each other, use a Zinc stearate-based powder (marketed as "Fanning powder") to lubricate the surface of the cards.

Introduction to Magic

Magic, including the arts of prestidigitation and conjuring, is the art of entertaining an audience by performing illusions that baffle and amaze, often by giving the impression that something impossible has been achieved, almost as if the performer had magic or supernatural powers. Yet, this illusion of magic is created entirely by natural means. The practitioners of this mystery art may be called magicians, conjurors, illusionists or prestidigitators. Artists in other media such as theatre, cinema, dance and the visual arts increasingly work using similar means but regard their magical techniques as of secondary importance to the goal of creating a complex cultural performance.