In addition to a good range of Bicycle Cards, Merlins of Wakefield have a wide range of their own card effects (mainly made in Bicycle stock!). We review one of them, Steve Dimmer’s 52 Card Monte, below…

Here’s the effect (description from their website):

The spectator is shown a card as you explain the “3 Card Monte” con game. Traditionally this used three cards, but you are going to use the full deck! The spectators card is shuffled into the deck and no matter which card the spectator points to they find their card. This can be repeated several times, despite the deck being shuffled the spectator locates their card every time. The spectator can choose a number, when the cards are dealt their card is at the chosen number! Sceptics suspects that all the cards are the same, you show the deck to be all the same, but a DIFFERENT one to the spectators card!

What do we think?

The Positives: This is certainly an entertaining routine. The nature of the trick means you can add or remove phases as you wish – so there is plenty of scope for individual presentation. The premise is easy to understand and the final climax should be unexpected. And it is very easy to do.

The deck we looked at was really well ‘made’ and handled beautifully. And it is made in Bicycle stock so will match your other decks. The printed instructions are clear and well written.

The slightly less positives: You probably won’t be surprised to hear this is a gaff deck – and as such it is a ‘one trick pony’. Depending on the context in which you do your magic this may or may not be a problem. Although it is easy to do, you will need to be a little careful on the handling. But we want to perform our magic well don’t we? So we will ALWAYS want to be careful on the handling! You won’t find an exciting new method here, but it’s the EFFECT that matters, right?!

All in all, we think this is a nice little effect. It will suit any ability of magician and you’ll be performing it almost straight away. And at only £12 it is good value too. Exclusively available at Merlins.

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