NIKITA YATSIK: LEADING FIGURE IN RUSSIAN CARDISTRY AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST. TOGETHER WITH EDUARD ADASKA, HE RUNS THE eccentric and innovative BRAND DOUBLENEVER AND HAS PRODUCED THREE ACCLAIMED DECKS. hE’S KNOWN FOR HIS UNIQUE STYLE COMBINING XCM AND MODERN PACKET CUTTING, CREATING FRESH AND IMPACTFUL MOVES.
by Luca Lanciotto, 2025.
Hi Nikita! it’s a pleasure to have you here today. For those who don’t know you yet, could you give us a quick introduction?
Hello! I’m an interdisciplinary artist from Ivanovo, Russia. I’ve been interested in magic since I was 7 years old, and I started practicing cardistry more seriously around the age of 12–13. In 2021, together with Eduard Adaska @edadasko, I co-founded our project never-never.
Yep, we definitely want to know more about DoubleNever, how did it all start, and what’s the main vision behind the project?
One day, at the end of 2019, I wrote to Ed: “Let’s make a deck.” He replied: “Let’s do it.”
In 2020, we designed our first deck, Byte. We ordered prototypes and started planning a shoot for spring 2020. But then the lockdown began, and I couldn’t travel to Ed in Belarus (in hindsight, it turned out to be for the best), so all the filming happened only in 2021.
About the concept and the launch of the project:
As we developed our perception in the field of design and culture, we came to the conclusion that cardistry lacked a fresh perspective on playing cards. Many brands create decks with beautiful designs, using cards as a canvas for art. We wanted to go further — to rethink the cards themselves as a medium, making them not just carriers of imagery but instruments that interact with perception.
The idea of never-never was born from the desire to step outside the usual boundaries and bring an element of surprise and visual “glitch” into playing cards. A turning point was winning the World Cardistry Championship in 2021, where the prize fund allowed us to cover the printing costs for a deck whose prototype we had already created earlier.
In the first deck, Byte, we played with semantic irony. While other brands focused on seriousness and minimalism, we wanted to balance it out with something personal yet absurd. That’s how we ended up with a design that, at first glance, looks like a schoolkid’s doodle in Paint, but still maintains a balance between naivety and style.
With the second deck, FOCUS, we applied the simplest blur effect to a deck of cards, creating a dissonance in the perception of a familiar object. In real life, these cards look like an artifact from an old computer game with unloaded textures.
In FLIP, the core idea is the rupture between the physical card and its image. The green background in the deck works like an intrusion of the Real, creating an illusion of perception. When flipping through the cards, the image rotates 360 degrees inside the physical card. This creates the effect where the image of the card and the physical card exist separately, yet interact through motion.
We believe this approach has a lot of potential: to treat the image not as an inseparable part of the card, but as something that can be deformed in various ways.
Your film production style is really fascinating. Do you draw inspiration from any particular artists or filmmakers? Personally, Tarkovsky comes to mind when I see your work.
Thank you so much! We often experiment with visuals and try new things for ourselves. While editing videos, I’m always learning new moves. I’ve been genuinely influenced by various artists and filmmakers such as David Lynch, Gaspar Noé, Yorgos Lanthimos, Andrei Tarkovsky, and many others.
I’m also very inspired by different eras and styles — for example, the “old internet” of the 2000s, fashion shoots from certain brands, and so on.
// A funny quick fact, I was born in the Ivanovo region, the same place where Tarkovsky was born.
That’s so cool! Now, let’s talk about what we believe is the heart of cardistry: the Community. I don’t know much about the Russian scene, could you tell us what it’s like there? How many cardists are around, and do you often organize local jams?
At the moment, the Russian community is actively growing, and that makes me really happy, because between around 2021 and 2024 it felt like fewer and fewer new people were getting into it. This year at the Veyer Cardistry Conference in Moscow, it was especially noticeable — I met a lot of new young cardists I hadn’t seen before.
Most of the Russian cardistry community that you might know today grew up on XCM and the early Fontaine videos — myself included. I’m really glad to see how the Russian community is growing year after year, and I believe that soon you’ll see new faces on the global stage. As for us at doublenever, we’ll do our best to highlight and support this growth.
From your perspective, what’s something special about the Russian cardistry scene that outsiders might not know?
The Russian cardistry community is not as large as, for example, in the US. There are several factors that influence this. Many parents born in the USSR have a generally negative attitude towards playing cards — for them, cards are primarily associated with gambling, cheating, or fraud. I’ve seen many cases where parents were initially against their child practicing magic or cardistry. But most of the time, if the child keeps doing it anyway, the parents eventually get used to it and accept it.
Playing cards in Russian culture really carry a very specific connotation, unlike in many other countries. There were even many situations in my own life when we, as cardists or magicians, would sit in shopping malls or even just in parks practicing with cards — and security guards would come up to us and ask us to put the cards away, thinking we were gambling or doing something like that. But recently, that happens less and less.
Another pretty important thing is that many people start practicing with local cards, which are very cheap, terrible quality, and not even poker size. At some point, you need to buy a Bicycle Standard deck, but it costs around 10 times more than a local deck. And for a kid, it’s pretty hard to explain to their parents why they need a deck for practice that costs 10 times more than the ones people usually play casual games with. But yeah, at some point parents accept it, haha. And that’s not even mentioning the more expensive decks from cardistry brands.
The gambling problem is pretty common (we also have it in Italy, and sometimes it makes jamming inside cafés difficult). Besides that, we saw that Veyer_Conf just wrapped up, congrats! Could you tell us how the event first came to life and how this latest edition went?
Veyer is the only cardistry event in Russia, organized by David Tsimbal (@davidimo_tsi), and we’re incredibly grateful to him for that. The main conference takes place once a year in the summer (starting in 2024), but there’s also a more intimate winter edition.
Originally, back in 2023, it wasn’t even planned as a conference — it was just an event where David premiered his new video. None of us expected that so many people from different cities would show up. We were sure it would just be a small gathering of friends who already knew each other. But around 30 people came, and it was amazing. That moment was what inspired David to turn it into a real cardistry conference. And the following year, the first Veyer took place.
Yes, the summer ended on a high note for the Russian cardistry community. Veyer lasted for 2 days, during which there were several activities such as solo lectures from me and Ed, the premiere of our new vlog-style video WHO ARE NEVER-NEVER, a screening of the documentary Out of the Box by Max Jung, cardistry games, and a live contest.
We honestly didn’t expect so many people to join the live contest — we were sure there would be maybe 5 participants at most. But in the end, there were 8 participants in the beginner category and 16 in the advanced one. Wow.
But the most important thing about events like this is the live connection and real communication. I hope that next year we’ll see even more new members joining our community!
That’s amazing, community is the heart of cardistry, and you guys are doing an outstanding job! Moving toward the conclusion, are there any spoilers you can share about your upcoming projects?
Ushh, that’s exactly what we’re talking about! Can’t wait to see what you’ve got planned! Thanks for your time, congrats on your projects, and keep shuffling. Cheers!
Nikita’s socials: @nikitalus & @doublenever
Website: https://doublenever.world