Product description: Ekaterina is an internationally renowned magician from Moscow, Russia. Gaining fame from her independently produced YouTube videos, she has since been featured on numerous television networks, including The CW, The History Channel, SyFy, and ITV. She’s had the opportunity to perform her signature card effect ‘Layers’ on multiple occasions, including to Penn and Teller, which is quite nice 🙂. This effect consists of a reveal in between the 2 layers of a single playing card. The reveal itself can be anything you want: a signature, a word, a picture, a drawing, a number, etc. This product is a 1 hour long streaming video in which she explains all the subtleties, variations and why this effect is a reputation maker. Let’s dive right into this review.
Price and where to buy it: This is sold at $29.95 and you can find it on her website : https://ekatmagic.com/. But you can get 15% off with the code : ALEXIS15 so it’s quite cool I think.
What you get: You get a one hour long video in which Katerina goes into everything you need to know and master in order to perform this miracle. I strongly advise you to also buy 52 split cards which she also sells on her website, it will make your life so much easier. And you may also need something which begins by R.C., so go get some before you receive the trick, you’ll be all set up to make the gimmicks. The gimmicks are easy to make and they really depend on which routine you want to perform, Ekaterina likes to produces gold foil pictures inside the card which look gorgeous but you can also do the signature which will go through the card. For the last one, it’s better to perform it for a celebrity, but you can get away with someone you’ll be working for. Overall, this is more a principle than a trick and you can then imagine all the possibilities you have with it.
The pros and the cons: Here is the core of my review, let's begin with the cons, as I will usually be doing, I prefer to keep the good things for the end.
THE CONS:
You have to prepare every single gimmick in order to perform this. I think we should not call them gimmicks but refills because you’ll use one at every performance.
You have to setup your layer gimmick before you go and perform at a gig, you can’t really do it on the fly (even if Ekaterina shows you a way to, but it’s not really practical in my opinion).
THE PROS:
I think the main pro is the routine in itself: spectators will find something INSIDE a card, and it can be their birthdate, the name of their father, anything !
The signature one is one of the strongest, it will require a bit of preparation but can play very very strong if done correctly.
The gimmicks are really easy to make, even if you have no experience in making gimmicks.
The video is amazingly shot, Ekaterina always produces amazing videos and this is no exception.
For the gold foil production, you’ll need another tool, as well as a printer.
It’s an impossible souvenir they can keep forever, you just made something appear inside the layers of the card, how can you top that ?
Overall rating: This principle is really clever and leave a lot room for your own presentation, I definitely think you should pick this up if you like it, you won’t be disappointed, 4/4 hearts.
As for the difficulty level, making the gimmick is easy and you just have to force a card (or make 52 gimmicks if you want to push it to the boundaries ^^) 2/5 stars.
Similar products: This is quite a unique revelation, I haven’t seen something like this.