Introduction to Tricks

If you’ve ever done judge prefs, you’ve undoubtedly stumbled upon a category of argument named ‘tricks;’ usually accompanied by a ‘strike me’ and a miniature rant about how exactly tricks are responsible for the death of the judges’ family, as tricks have garnered a bit of a reputation for abusiveness. In the interest of vindicating this dying art, we’ll go into the two main tricks, what they are, and how to answer them. 

Substantive Tricks

Substantive tricks are the most commonly run and the most numerous, they aim to win the substance layer of any round by either invalidating offense or proving why the resolution itself is inherently true or false. The key to reading substantive tricks is truth testing, a role of the ballot that dictates the burden of the affirmative is to prove the truth of the resolution and the negative is to deny the truth of the resolution. This also entails treating the resolution as a statement of linguistic and moral truth, not reliant on real-world impacts, and typically excluding offense that doesn’t directly concern the resolution but instead its implications. This means most offense done under truth testing is a priori, or comes before, representations and policy. The following are five (well, technically six) of the most common substantive tricks...  

1. A priori’s

A priori’s are also the name given to the most common substantive tricks, usually in the form of logical syllogisms where a conclusion is drawn from two premises. For instance, the principle of explosion will ask you to hold the statements “all lemons are yellow” and “not all lemons are yellow” as semantically valid. From there, it posits the conditional “all lemons are yellow, or unicorns exist; finally, since not all lemons are yellow, the second clause in the conditional must be true - meaning that unicorns have been proven to exist. This might seem unintuitive and kind of idiotic, or perhaps just very confusing, but the aim of blippy a priori’s like these is to go dropped so that they can be collapsed on in the 1AR/2AR (or the NR, but this a priori is not usually won on neg). 

The key takeaway is that conceding these is an instant loss; since they directly address the resolution as a statement, a priori’s uplayer all other offense on the substance layer as a prior question to derivative arguments. 

Other sorts of a priori’s exist too, such as definitional a priori’s. Think back to the resolved: “the United States ought to rewild substantial tracts of land”; one intuitively thinks of tracts as plots of land, but a specific definitional a priori run on the topic had defined them as a “system of body parts or organs” and opted to demonstrate that the resolved: “the United States ought to rewild substantial organs” was incoherent and thus untrue. 

Also, consider the ‘conditional’ a priori that sees a ‘tacit ballot conditional.’ The argument is that denying the premise proves the conclusion; in the context of “if the affirmative debater wins the round, they get the ballot” (the text of the premise), it means that if the negation denies the affirmative won then the affirmative wins anyways. Again, the strength of these arguments lies in the number of them one can read and how they can be easily hidden in card texts or dense underviews. 

2. Linguistic Trivialism

Linguistic Trivialism states that all statements are trivially true, usually to both auto-affirm the resolution and warrant the truth of intuitively false paradoxes like the principle of explosion. A second principle, deontic logic - which states that for something to be true it must be absolutely true - is often run with trivialism to use the same paradoxes to negate the resolution instead of affirming it; but this is easily turnable, so it is advisable to run deontic logic as a standalone argument. 

3. Permissibility and Presumption

Permissibility typically aims to prove that there is no proactive obligation to do the affirmative, meaning it is permissible to vote neg absent said obligation which implies that the resolution can’t be a morally binding statement. The way to assess permissibility as offense is to go for a permissibility trigger, which is functionally just an indict to whatever calculus or metric is used to guide action. 

The most common examples are underview or case-page arguments like ‘induction fails’ or the ‘butterfly effect’ that claim consequentialist frameworks (primarily utilitarianism) can’t act predict consequences; if a consequentialist framework is contingent on proving, well… consequences, then there is no longer a risk of offense and the framework can’t guide action, so it then becomes permissible to vote neg absent offense. For this to work as a direct indict, one would have to concede every other part of the framework so that only the weighing mechanism fails since it doesn’t attack the syllogism but the metric to evaluate success. Permissibility is also accessed alongside presumption on the truth testing page, usually with a statement like “the resolution asks us to prove an obligation and permissibility denies an obligation,” which means it pairs nicely with moral skepticism. 

Presumption is the term used when a judge votes negatively due to a lack of offense, commonly employed as a form of intervention in very tight or messy rounds. Meaning that triggering presumption is incredibly strategic since all other offense is invalidated in favor of the trigger, contingent on whether presumption flows to your side. For instance, triggering presumption on neg often involves warranting things like “it’s safer to presume the status quo” or “we presume statements false until proven true” to first ensure that presumption flows neg. Then, the negative debater will use a mechanism like the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (there are infinite, physically possible, and simultaneously existing worlds) or act-omission distinction (there is a difference between choosing to do something, and not doing something but one shouldn’t necessarily be held accountable for not doing certain supererogatory things) to prove that we can’t be held morally responsible for not doing the plan, which means you presume neg since the aff is contingent on acting. 

Presumption also acts as offense for triggering moral skepticism (that there is no such thing as (at least, objective) morality) which deserves its own guide for how nuanced and broad it is, both conceptually and strategically. It must be noted, too, that many other tricks will attempt to trigger either permissibility or presumption.

4. Indexicals

My favorite trick (yes I’m biased). Indexicals traditionally evolved as an auto-affirmation argument - much like trivialism - where the thesis is that if there is any framework under which the affirmative is true, then you affirm. Further still, a recently innovated subset of indexicals - quantum indexicals - argues that if there is any universe [or index] (of which there are infinite) where the resolution is true then you affirm. This can be strategically paired with quantum monism (that the multiverse is an entangled quantum state, everything is true and false, happens and doesn’t happen, etc..) and deontic logic to undermine absolute certainty in the resolution being absolutely true, insofar as it being true and not true means you presume it isn’t. 

Moreso, indexicals can be used as a mechanism to frame out offense that the other side reads. This is done through loci, or groupings of indexes in this context, which limit the debate to indexes where “x obtains” (happens) or doesn’t “obtain;” on the resolved: “the possession of nuclear weapons are immoral” I read a locus of quantum indexes to frame the round, only including worlds where nuclear weapons were never invented - triggering presumption if conceded. Additionally, indexicals are strong warrants for linguistic skepticism (the argument that words can’t represent an objective reality) since different words can index a theoretically infinite amount of things. 

5. Determinism

One of the more philosophical tricks, determinism aims to prove that everything everything has been predetermined; the reason this is a trick is that winning determinism implies that we can’t be held morally responsible for our actions, ergo any resolution begging a proactive moral obligation must be false since moral obligations are beyond our capacity. Winning determinism is also a means by which to gut entire ethical frameworks without putting much ink on them since most moral frameworks presume that agents have moral obligations, making for a strategic time trade-off that the negation can leverage to answer the case and preempt the 1AR. Determinism plays one more role, as a trigger for moral skepticism that one can collapse on in the 2NR. 

Theoretical Tricks

These sorts of tricks are [mostly] responsible for the bad reputation that tricks seem to have garnered over the years. What is meant by theoretical is that these tricks aim to win the theory layer, instead of the substance layer; often in the form of blippy or underwarranted shells and interps that mean to take advantage of inherent need to put ink on every part of a shell, these tricks are largely time suck strategies for NC’s or spikes for AC’s to gain an advantage going into the debate. Here are a few commonly read ones:

1. Evaluate the debate after “X” speech

This is the most infamous one, so it felt prudent to start with it. The point of this trick is to force the judge to only weigh offense and argumentation after a cutoff point in the round, typically the end of the second speech of the debater reading this. Like most other theoretical tricks, ‘eval after X’ aims to gamify standards such as fairness and education while being intuitively harmful to both. Usually, justifications are something along the lines of it being structurally untenable for the 2NR to occur since the 2AR is only three minutes which makes comebacks unlikely. That said, the only strategic advantage of these is the fact it blends into a lengthy underview/overview so it’s likely to be dropped - at which point you can collapse on it in the speech that signifies the end of the round if you are winning the trick (although you’d also be hard pressed to find a judge who even votes on ‘eval after X’). 

2. Frivolous Theory

While not inherently a trick, these shells can be read in ‘tricky’ manners. For instance, most debaters will have heard of “hidden aspec” at some point in their careers - referring to a theory shell that states the affirmative must specify the actor of the plan. Hidden aspec is then hiding a one-line version of this in an analytic somewhere on the doc or exempting it mid-constructive and hoping it goes dropped, which allows the debater who read it to extend it in shell form in their speech and collapse on theory late in the round. 

In more blatant forms, some debaters even opt to go ‘26 off then case’ in which they go for “A-to-Z spec” or a spec shell for every letter of the alphabet - classified as frivolous because they impose an impossible burden on the affirmative to predict everything that needs specification [including the plan’s connection to the Zapatista’s or ‘zspec’]. Other longer shells are read as a form of time-suck, like the Skibidi Toilet theory, or its newer contemporary 6-7 theory that aims to force the affirmative into an irreciprocal time commitment on the theory layer. 

3. 1AR Restarts/Theory NC’s

This refers more to the practice of reading tricky arguments in a specific way than the tricks themselves. 1AR restarts embody this concept, instead of trying to extend through a 7-minute NC they close the gap by reading new shells and a tight underview of substantive tricks, usually with truth testing as well. The same concept applies to theory-heavy NC’s, that will go for several developed shells and theory hege arguments aiming to secure the theory layer through the 1AR - often sporting dense blocks of spikes and analytics that could also include substantive tricks.

Responding to Tricks

If you’ve made it to this point, the main weaknesses of tricks should be fairly evident. First, many of them, absent a dedicated constructive, are contingent on you dropping them to garner offense. This means that careful flowing is required, but many judges have a lower bar for answering tricks than other sorts of arguments - ensuring time commitment is more reciprocal when answering. Second, most tricks are highly turnable. Trivialism posits that all statements are trivially true, this means the statement “the resolution is false” is true as well - which is paradoxical at worst which can be called out. Similarly, Occam’s razor as a syllogism aims to spike out responses to tricks but can be turned onto itself as a form of "unnecessary overthinking.” Third, it’s best to not spend too much time on one trick unless it’s your win condition; many tricks rely on you to perform some unnecessary overthinking that leads to wasted time in round, instead, only focus on whether the argument is turnable or intuitively false.