Isolation of Royal Families by Biagio Fasano (B. Magic)

An automatic and practically impromptu card magic effect that requires an unusual pack of poker cards whose simple preparation is done in front of the audience, if not by entrusting it to a spectator

For each of the four suits, figures (Jack, Queen, King) and Aces are drawn, stacking them neatly in four different bundles, to represent the aristocratic members of the city’s four important houses, who would like to return to being well-liked by their citizenry.

For this purpose, the two Jokers are hired as “image consultants,” and their first piece of advice is that each of the members should be stationed at the four focal points of the city, to attend and give rise to the most important events. Therefore, a spectator collects, in the order she prefers, one by one the piles and deals the cards at her discretion, as long as at the end there is one of each suit in each of the four cardinal points. The initiative seems to be immediately successful, until unfortunately one of the nobles seems to have assumed far too much fame, to the detriment of the others. The magician therefore invites the spectator to gather the four bundles according to her preference, he shuffles them further and hands the cards to the spectator to cut and complete. Opening it to fan out, he has the spectator choose the card that will represent the infamous aristocrat and lay it face down on the table. To solve the problem and the inevitable jealousies it generates, the two consultants propose to divide all the other cards between the most and least popular: dislocated at the ends of the deck, they begin a suitable count to generate a new sorting.

When finished, only three cards will end up “captured” by the two wild cards and will be placed next to the chosen card, but all other cards will also end up being divided into three groups. The counselors will then reveal that the only way to overcome the problems of the four houses will be to “go back to grouping”. In fact, the three cards will turn out to be from the same family (suit) as the chosen card, but also each of the three groups will exclusively contain the four members of the same household!