The system that worked best for me was a video by Rick Lax teaching you how to memorize the Mnemonica Stack. The video is sold by Penguin for $19.95. I found the name. Mnemonica Trainer by Rick Lax (Instant Download)$19.95. It’s well worth the money if your planning to memorize the Mnemonica Stack

Doug Dyment’s thoughts on full deck stacks are also very much worth reading:
https://www.deceptionary.com/aboutstacks.html

It throws algorithmic stack in the mix of stacks to consider.

Plus 1 to this. It took about a week to get the system locked into my head, then about a year to make it almost natural. It was quite workable after just a few weeks, but I reckon a true mem deck takes quite a while to become second nature, with instant recall of every card to number and vice versa.

What is interesting is that, whilst I still have all of my Rick Lax notes, I cannot recall what many of the mnemonics are now. The deck has become its own thing.

One more comment is that, given I am not from USA, I altered quite a few of the mnemonics to things that meant something to me. Several of Rick’s associations were very USA centric, which is understandable, but it was easy to adjust a few and make them my own.

I agree - a good value purchase for any aspiring mem decker.

It is fairly effective. I learned it first without Rick Lax’s way of memorizing it and became decent with Mnemonica stuff. I actually sorta forgot it and endeavored to re-mem it along the lines of the Lax work and got it down again pretty good. But the thing with this is that you must practice it or use it regularly to keep it. I didn’t use it much, so I lost it. Who knows, maybe one day I will do it all over again, but there’s so many other interesting ways that release you from brute memorization, that brings about the same result as to these effects, that I might drift more that way as to this stuff. For instance, using it for ACAAN…There have been ways developed that skip you right by all the memorization and math pretty much to the same end, i.e., Berg FAST, TAKAAN both offer interesting, doable, & easier alternatives.

But overall, learning Mnemonica was a good mind exercise and worth doing. I think I first got it down in just few days fairly good. But with this thing, you gotta get it down really good, so that you know it every-which-way for it to be successful for you in presentation of tricks that use the method. I’m mostly a decent at best coin guy, but maybe if I had as great an interest in cards, I perhaps might’ve gotten it, used it (and kept it) a lot better.

Mnemonica (the book) has a whole section on memorizing the stack, I used it about 10 years ago, the combination of the various methods is very effective, to this day after not having practiced for about 5-6 years I still know it as well. There also is a $3 app (at least on Android, Mnemonicosis) to practice different stack related stuff. With all that I'm not sure I would spend another $20 on a Rick Lax video to be honest if I were to learn it again today.

If you were to use a cyclical stack, lets say 8 kings stack. You spread the cards for a few seconds to show its fairly mixed. Would anyone even notice it?

No

I agree and the same could probably be said for many other decks such as Joyal's 6 Hour stack, Si Stebbins, Bart Harding, Quicker Stack, etc, etc.

I also believe that many great effects have been developed with these decks in mind and are worthy of learning.

Nonetheless, and I am biased, none of them can produce the apparent "miracles" that a truly memorised deck will offer. The hard work up front is worth it. As mentioned above, my initial learning was done with Rick Lax's system (Mnemonica), but those memory pegs have long gone ... and the cards and their corresponding number identity have replaced them, with instant recall, both ways.

I keep it all alive by performing several mem-deck effects that are in my favourites (listed elsewhere on these pages), as well as reciting them in various ways, a few times a week, when my head hits the pillow. That process replaced "counting sheep" a few years ago. I will often run through times tables; sequences of all of the cards with a stack number ending in 1, 2, 3, etc; or running through the suits/values in order (forwards and/or backwards), etc - just to break it up.

It is really only a few minutes a week, but it keeps it fresh and has firmly planted it well and truly into the long term memory section of my tiny brain . . .