This variety of force deck uses the principle of alternating the cards of a ranging force bank with indifferent cards, so that the spectator can cut or deal through the deck to any point, and one of the force cards will be either the card he last dealt or the next card of the deck. The earliest prepared deck using this principle is the Svengali Deck, which forces a particular card rather than one in a limited group.

Moving from gimmicked decks to stacks in a standard deck, Edward Bagshawe employed a 1-0-1 type stack in “Sealed Mystery” from Twenty Magical Novelties, 1930, p. 26. Further applications of the principle began to appear in the 1930s, such as S. Leo Horowitz's “Psychological Discovery” in Greater Magic (1938, p. 549) and “Never-miss Stop Trick” from Martin Gardner's 12 Tricks with a Borrowed Deck in 1940, p. 12.

The best-known example of a 1-0-1 stack is the 1-0-1 Deck, comprised of duplicate banks of four force cards alternated with indifferent cards. This deck was first described, in the context of “Five Star Miracle”, in Best of Billfooled by Harry Lorayne (1958) and seems to be Lorayne's idea. The deck is frequently misattributed to Al Koran and called the Koran Deck, due to his influential presentation of “Five Star Miracle”.

See Banked Deck