Magicians have long scored cards for immediate folding or tearing when constructing props and gaffs, well in advance of performance. Later, they realized that such scores could be left unused until secretly needed during the performance itself.

An early example of using secretly scored cards is an anonymous suggestion to fake the strongman feat of tearing a deck in half by pre-scoring each card. This appeared in The Sphinx, Vol. 17 No. 6, Aug. 1918, p. 113.

The use of scoring to aid not just in ease of ripping, but in precision, too, was used by Bill Severn in his “Let's Play Post Office” trick in The Sphinx, Vol. 46 No. 12, Feb. 1948, p. 372. In it, Severn scored the corner of a card so it could be torn off in performance and match a duplicate card that already had its corner missing. David Wright pushed this concept further with his “Torn and Restored Card” trick where he detailed how to create a template of a corner and use it to score as many cards as you need, almost in the vein of a proto-Intercessor (Gaëtan Bloom's marketed “Intercessor” is a metal template that facilitates the tearing of identical corners). Wright published this in The Magic Circular, Vol. 53 No. 592, Jan. 1959, p. 58.

The use of score lines to aid in folding rather than tearing was used by Tommy Wonder in his “Squeeze” trick. This appeared in Wonder Material, nd. (c. 1983), n.p., and later in The Books of Wonder, Volume 1, 1996, p. 151. Applying the idea specifically to the task of secretly folding a card into quarters was developed by Michael Boden, appearing in his Beautiful Moves DVD set, c. 2009.

See also: Card Folding Technique.