with Demo Video in Magic & Mentalism: page 42

While you turn over a small packet of cards, you palm the bottom card. Here, Peter uses this move in a small packet routine to have Aces and tens change their packets.

1st edition 2025, video 3:59.

In the early '70's Jon Racherbaumer received 8 mm color footage of Chuck Smith executing a five-card poker hand switch. This was featured in the short film Lookout, Cleveland, now on YouTube. An excerpt is shown below. A letter from Smith is included here describing how he used it during WWII while in the military. This unique technique has been kept hidden until now. It is not easy, as many things are happening at once. This takes skill and nerve. The price is designed to keep it out of the hands of the curious. While we don't condone cheating, it is time this was recorded for posterity. ...

A stunning color change. Four cards showing several pips, what Peter calls 'compressed cards', change into the four aces.

1st edition 2025, video 3:03.

Early books on magic, such as Modern Magic and Illustrated Magic (1931) stressed mastering the pass as fundamentally necessary to every card handler. As time went on, easier sleights such as the double cut to the break replaced it, rendering it anachronistic. Times change. Recently, a friend was asked to comment on one of today's card experts. Her reply, "Too much shuffling." Modern audiences often don't know what happened, but they sense when it happened (He did something tricky) because of excessive cutting and shuffling. Attention spans are shorter now so effects must...

A card and a number, generated by a spectator's imagination, find a perfect match in reality, in a deck of cards that was in plain sight, on the table, from the beginning.

An incredible mentalism effect with playing cards, in which the illusionist tells of an ancestral magical ritual in which all the cards participate, gathering at a sacred mountain ... There, in the grip of visions caused by alcohol and drug abuse, each will discover its assigned "place in life". A kind woman imagines their "return to their village," still tipsy and staggering enough that she easily succeeds in blocking...

You start out with four aces and eight other cards. The four aces are placed individually on the table with two other cards on top of each other. The aces magically gather in one pack and then immediately return to their individual packets.

1st edition 2025, video 3:39.

A prediction is lying on the table. The magician asks a spectator to cut a shuffled deck in three parts and to pile them up. Then, he removes the Jokers as he explains that he and the spectator are going to choose a card through an elimination procedure. To do so, he deals the cards in two piles and asks the spectator to choose one. They are left with one half of the deck. The magician deals the cards again and chooses a pile this time. They are now left with a quarter of the deck. The procedure is repeated a couple of times again (once with the spectator choosing a pile and once with the...

You start with two packets of four identical cards each, for example, four 10s of hearts, and four aces of spades. You interleave them, show them again singly to confirm that they have been interleaved, but then magically they have separated. You do this twice, once face-down, and the second time face-up.

1st edition 2025, video 2:04.

Want a sock finish for your favorite ambitious card routine? Here it is. The object card is always handled by two indifferent cards. A perfect effect to add "medical" themed patter to your routine.

[Cover photo credit: Louis Sahuc]

1st edition 2025, video 40s.

An impossible prediction.

Your spectator uses their own phone to fill a 3x3 grid with numbers 1-9 in completely random positions. They calculate the mathematical total themselves using their own choices, their own device, their own numbers. (Note: The input method is handwriting. To give you an idea, this is the app the spectator will use to manually fill out the 3x3 grid.)

Yet you've already predicted their exact result.

No apps to download. No gimmicked props. Pure mathematical impossibility.

Why this destroys audiences:

• Their phone, their choices - eliminates every possible...

A magical journey undertaken by a spectator based on her choices inevitably leads to the result predicted by the magician.

A spectator raises a deck of cards previously shuffled, shuffles it in turn and chooses a card from which to begin a journey that will inevitably end at a card that was prophesied from the beginning and which, lost in the deck, will be magically found by the magician at the very number assigned to it by that same path taken together.

This is a new Card Magic effect in which, after showing and quickly shuffling a standard deck of poker cards, the magician asks a spectator...

This is a "Twisting the Aces" routine, here performed with the Jacks, that includes two color changes of the backs. First, they change from blue to red, and then the Jacks all have different backs.

1st edition 2025, video 3:32.

When Jimmy Grippo saw this in 1974, he realized its merits and immediately added it to his repertoire. It requires no turnovers or other distracting actions, but is not for the card novice. The effort it requires is more than adequately repaid by its stunning effect, coupled with a surprise ending. You receive a bonus tutorial on the Ascanio Spread with the instructions for the effect. These helpful videos easily enable you to achieve success. Note that a table isn't required.

[Cover photo credit: Patricia Ireland]

1st edition 2025, video 3:04

Four cards with backs on both sides turn into four queens, then back to backs, and then again to four queens.

1st edition 2025, video 2:09.

Four aces vanish in a pile of blank cards, only to magically reappear.

1st edition 2025, video 4:15

Now available as a video download. For the PDF version, see Card Trail.

Five effects and one in-the-hands false cut. Jaw-dropping card magic that's big on impact and easy on the knuckles. Fun plots and novel methods abound in this compilation of pasteboard chicanery.

IMPROBABLE VS. IMPOSSIBLE -- A prediction effect and four Ace production... sounds weird but it's really cool.

OUT OF POCKET -- An insanely visual card and bill transposition.

SAVING ACE -- A Triumph/Ace location effect that makes you look like a sleight of hand master, but is pretty easy to do.

PROVIDENCE -- A sandwich effect...

Three cards are added to each of the four aces, but the aces magically get back together, besides other cards separating them.

As the name suggests, the ATFUS (Any Time Face-Up Switch) move has something to do with the method of this effect. No gaffs are needed. This is a sleight of hand routine.

1st edition 2025, video 2:55

One night at the Magic Castle, two young Germans showed this to Dai Vernon. Nine cards change to completely different cards with no hint of sleight of hand. A startling effect, it has the added plus of being in anybody's skill range, using only nine cards and no gaffs. You can customize this to illustrate whatever your imagination can devise.

The demo and tutorial videos will have you doing this in a matter of minutes.

1st edition 2025, video 2:02.

You can use the turn count to, for example, display several identical cards with one odd card. Upon turning over a card, the faces have all changed to the odd card, with only one left with the old face. You will need some double facers to use it in this way.

1st edition 2025, video 2:39

Mammoths used to be animals immense in size and power - and Mammoth Tear delivers exactly that and more.

This is a two-step center tear where you have the 'option' to cleanly show both the front and back of the folded paper - with absolutely nothing suspicious to see. It's bold, deceptive, and incredibly fair.

Not ready to peek right away? No problem. Mammoth Tear features a clever design that lets you steal the center with ease. It also allows you to open it with a single hand, the right side up, always - giving you complete control over the timing.

The ability to access someone's...

You start by showing one joker and several blank cards, which are blank on both sides. Adding the joker to the blank cards makes them all become jokers on their faces. Then you do the same with the backs and end up with a pack of jokers. The blank cards have changed to jokers.

1st edition 2025, video 3:27.

Predict the outcome of a gambling game with 100% accuracy.

The magician offers to play a gambling game. He brings out two envelopes and removes three coins from one of them. Two spectators (S1 and S2) select one coin each. The magician gives the other envelope – which contains a prediction – to a third spectator (S3).

Then, from a packet of blue-backed and red-backed cards, S3 chooses a Secret Card that is put onto the prediction. The remainder is dealt to make up the board on which the coins will move along to select a card (one card equals one square).

The rules are simple: The...

You show one card with a big hole cut from its center and four regular cards without any holes. When you remove one from the regular cards and add the hole card to the others, they all suddenly also have big holes. Then you reverse it back to no holes. It uses a sneaky combination of methods.

1st edition 2025, video 4:24

One of the finest and fastest card effects from the creative mind of Ed Marlo. It uses no special cards and requires only basic skills. Fast and clean. A reputation marker.

1st edition 2025, PDF + video 00:45.