The effect, in which a card is removed from a small group but comically reappears time after time, was published by T. Page Wright. Calling it “The Error Aces”, he initially wrote a description of it in the late 1920s for a book manuscript that was not published until 1991 as Page Wright's Manuscript: Sixty Years of Lost Secrets, p. 232. The routine, however, did reach print much earlier, in the first issue of Genii, Vol. 1 No. 1, Sep. 1936, p. 6. In Wright's presentation, the Ace of Spades was discarded from the four Aces, but kept magically returning, to comical effect, in a prelude to an Ace Assembly.

Ishida Tenkai developed a routine “The Flying Queen”, in which a Queen is discarded from a packet repeatedly, yet it comes back. While it was first published in English only in 1953 as “Tenkai Card Flight” in Robert Parrish's Six Tricks by Tenkai, it was developed most likely at least in the 1930s, the exact date being unknown.

Fred Braue later devised a similar effect, which he called “The Homing Card” (not to be confused with the repeat Card to Pocket routine, “The Homing Card”, published by Francis Carlyle). Braue's routine, published in Show Stoppers with Cards by Hugard and Braue (1948, p. 13), involves a single red card that insists on returning to a group of black cards. Braue cited Tommy Tucker's “Six-Card Repeat” as an influence, and seems unaware of Wright's or Tenkai's efforts, as he proclaimed “The Homing Card” “a genuinely new card trick with a new plot.”

Also see: Bluff Card to Pocket and Six-Card Repeat.

* Category in Denis Behr's "Conjuring Archive"