NOTE: If this has been reviewed previously, I searched for a review and came up with nada, so if I've just been blind and/or stupid could a kind Mod let me know and I will repost it in the appropriate thread!
The Card of Nosferatu by Tony Chris & Card Shark
The Effect
(can be used with regular Bicycle cards, but trust me, WAY better with the faded Heirloom deck, which I will use for this example.)
An ancient looking deck of cards is brought out and shown to the audience. The magician explains that this deck of cards was passed down to him by his grandfather, who in turn recieved it from his grandfather. It was supposedly taken from Dracula's Fortress in Transylvania by Romanian gypsies, and is reported to retain the curse of Dracula himself.
A face card depicting Dracula is shown and placed on the table. A volunteer selects a card from the deck, remembers it and then places it back anywhere in the deck. The Dracula card is the placed face up on top and the whole deck is cut. When the deck is spread, Dracula has found his victim, the chosen card, which now has two neat, bloody holes punched into it.... spooky!
Cost
£16 from Magick Lounge in Sheffield.
Difficulty
(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)
This is definately a 1 for sleights, but the point here is story-telling, selecting the right setting.
Review
I bought this because I was looking for something different to my usual card trickery, that had a nice spooky edge to it because around where I grew up there are some pretty grizzly ghost stories from the area, and a fairly famous haunted house, so I'm putting together a bit of a bizzarre/scary routine.
I obviously won't go into any of the workings of the trick, but its definately one that gives you plenty of brain power spare to really sell the tale. I like my sleights and card trickery alot, so this is a nice change of pace to sit back and spin a terrifying tale for an audience. There are several options with the gimmicks, you get one old looking Nosferatu card, three cards to match a Bicycle deck (use a red backed one if you want to use these, it looks cooler at the end
) and three cards matching the Heirloom deck. I would seriously go with the latter when performing this, it just suits the whole thing much better.
The set comes with a booklet with full-colour instructions, with photographs accompanying each step of the whole thing in case you get lost. You won't get lost though, the instructions are very clear and alot of thought has gone into the patter and storyline that is in the booklet, including some creepy folk-lore type poems and some pretty believeable stuff about Dracula, such as he enjoyed playing cards with his victims before he drained them, a nice little touch I thought. Its all very well laid out, with slightly different patter highlighted for use with a Bicycle deck than the Heirloom deck, though the routine itself doesn't change whichever deck you use.
Overall
I like this set, its different from what I normally do and for me, the start of my journey into more bizzarre/gothic/story-based magic. Its a pretty simple trick when stripped down, but the detail in the gimmicks, the fading, the little bat index on the Nosferatu card and the great story mean that when you do it right, with a good emphasis on the tale rather than the "trick" it has a truly cracking climax.
There are more expensive tricks out there using strange cards, with similarly dark storylines (From Hell, for example) that may seem more powerful, but at £16 this is a great trick to by candlelight! I'll be using it when I get a more sinister magical routine built up.
8/10
