Mona Lisa's Secret by Card Shark
The Effect/What it says on the tin
You show your spectators several masterpieces of art printed on playing cards. One of the paintings is the famous Mona Lisa. After showing all four paintings, you point out, that one of the paintings is a forgery. When you show Mona Lisa a second time, she is suddenly holding a Bicycle® playing card in her hand. Turning the card around, the spectators are surprised to see Mona Lisa painted from behind. She has to be the fake! But that is not all, imagine the shock when Mona Lisa reveals she is holding the same card a spectator has previously chosen!
Cost
£17.00 from
www.cards4magic.co.uk
£15.99 from
www.worldmagicshop.co.uk (there's a demo vid there to show the routine)
€24.50 or $28.00 from
www.card-shark.de
and no doubt from many other places as well - search around for deals.
Difficulty
Only just over a 2 as there’s one easy sleight and one move but nothing knuckle busting.
(1=easy to do, 2=No sleights, but not so easy, 3=Some sleights used,
4=Advanced sleights used, 5=Suitable for experienced magicians only)
Review
I first saw this at Blackpool last year and since them of course, Christian Schenk has produced and released all those lovely Vintage cards, Medieval Tarot cards with oodles of gaffs, specials and accessories to go with them. The key word in all of these products is high quality art, design and printing, and Mona Lisa’s Secret is no exception. The card stock has that luxury feel just like Bicycle cards, the quality of the art is wonderful and the printing is excellent. What you actually hold are miniature masterpieces of known works of art and all this makes you forget it’s a routine with cards. The effect works exactly as described above, the magic biz involves one easy move and a D/L, the rest is story telling.
Overall
Not a self worker but oh so close, even a card klutz like me can perform the move and the D/L so nothing challenging at all. You need to provide a deck of standard Bikes, red or blue backs are accommodated, and with all the bits and pieces supplied, you can reveal three different cards. Christian even includes some notes and comments about the different pieces of art used so you can patter on like an expert and you can easily do a bit of web surfing to add to these notes. One version of this uses a picture of the Tweety Pie cartoon character, the other uses a child’s painting of a lion. The working is identical, just a change of image for various reasons and, to be honest, I rather like the lion picture and it’ll be presented as a very early Rembrandt or something like that!
Rating: 9/10
Art lovers would easily rate this at 10 just for the cards themselves!
Value for Money
9/10. A very nice packet trick with cards which isn’t a card trick – although it is. If you see what I mean.