Tricks vs Effects.

I'm not sure who originally said it but in one of Ellusionist's videos Brad Christian says something along the lines of "If you know 100 card controls and one reveal you know one trick. If you know one control and 100 reveals then you know 100 tricks." No for the purpose of this post I'm going to define tricks as methods and effects as what the spectator perceives. For instance the Erdnase color change is the trick, the idea that one card chnged into another is the effect. So you could do the Erdnase and then do a snap change and to you it two completely different things but to you spectator you just did the same thing twice only one was more flashy (while we'er on the subject I think my favorite color change is the Svengali color change by Dai Vernon).


It seems to me that every time I turn around there an effect I just have to know that I have to learn a new slight or subtly for, but I feel that what I need is more effects that use the tricks I already know. And I know its possible cause when I read Life, Death and Other Card tricks by Robert Neal one of the thoughts I had was 'this man is in love with the Elmsly count.' There were a lot of effect in that book that used the Elmsly count, but to my mind they were different enough to be separate effects.