Your friend cuts the deck into four piles and does all the mixing themselves, following your instructions. You never touch a card. At the end the top card of every single pile is an Ace.
🌟 Level 1: Apprentice
⏱ 5 minutes to learn
🃏 Cards
🎒 Ages 6+
Works by itself, or one simple move. It works the first try.
What you need
The secret
Get ready, before anybody is watching
Before anyone is watching, find the four Aces and put them on top of the deck.
Most beginner card tricks use a secret "key card" that you know, or a special order the cards are in before you start. Your friend picks a card, the secret quietly leads you to it, and then you reveal it in the most dramatic way you can think of.
What is the Magician's Code?
It's the promise magicians make each other: keep the secret, practise before you perform, and never do the same trick twice for the same audience. We add a fourth one in this shop: always be kind to your helpers.
Your friend cuts the deck into four piles and does all the mixing themselves, following your instructions. You never touch a card. At the end the top card of every single pile is an Ace. It's a level 1 apprentice trick for ages 6 to 11 (grades 1st–5th), takes 5 minutes to learn, and needs one thing you already have. Flick, the shop's rabbit, reads every step aloud with a picture, so a child can follow it alone.
The secret
The four Aces start on top of the deck, and you quietly keep track of which pile they land in. The mixing buries them and then hands one Ace to each pile, as long as the Ace pile goes last.
What you need
A deck of cards
Get ready, before anybody is watching
Before anyone is watching, find the four Aces and put them on top of the deck.
How to do it
Ask your friend to cut the deck into four piles in a row.
Starting at the far left pile, they move three cards from its top to its bottom.
Then they deal one card off that pile onto each of the other three.
They do the same for the next pile, and the next: three under, one to each.
The Ace pile goes last. Three under, then one card onto each other pile.
Ask them to turn over the top card of all four piles. Four Aces.
Magic words to say
“Aces are the bosses of the deck. You can mix them, cut them, bury them, shuffle them — and when the dust settles, the bosses are back on top. Every time.”
Pro tips
Let your friend do every single move. You stand back with your hands behind you, which makes it impossible.
Say the instructions once, clearly, and then just point. Pointing looks like you aren't doing anything.
Four piles is better than three. It takes longer and the ending is four times bigger.
If something goes wrong
If the piles get muddled, turn them over anyway: an Ace usually still shows up somewhere. Say "one boss turned up, the others are on holiday", and go again from the start.
Safety notes
Needs a helper.
Sit at a table.
No fire, no flames and nothing sharp in a child's hand anywhere in the Magic Shop. Nothing ever goes in a mouth, a nose or an ear.
What kind of trick is this?
🎩 Production. Something appears out of nowhere. Almost every trick ever invented is one of eight kinds, and knowing which one you're watching is how magicians work out how a new trick is done.
The skill it teaches:Working with helpers. A helper should walk away feeling brilliant. Perform it and it counts towards the Card Keeper badge.
Questions about the four aces trick
How do you do a card trick?
Most beginner card tricks use a secret "key card" that you know, or a special order the cards are in before you start. Your friend picks a card, the secret quietly leads you to it, and then you reveal it in the most dramatic way you can think of.
What is the Magician's Code?
It's the promise magicians make each other: keep the secret, practise before you perform, and never do the same trick twice for the same audience. We add a fourth one in this shop: always be kind to your helpers.