My wedding anniversary is coming up in a couple of months, and as my wife and I will be visiting The Magic Castle in LA (for the first time ever) on our special night, I thought it might be nice if I could perform a special trick just for her, right there at our dinner table. But what?

I remember an episode of the original Star Trek series ("Charlie X") in which a young man with strange psi powers used those powers to perform a card trick for a female yeoman he had a crush on. He dealt a few random cards, and then used his psi powers to turn the faces of those cards into photos of said yeoman, to impress her.

I always thought that would make for a pretty cool trick, even if you could only do it once. With my magic-themed annniversary coming up, I think I might just have the opportunity to try something along those lines out on my wife.

In thinking about precisely what sort of effect or routine to employ, I finally settled upon adopting a variant of the popular "NFW" packet trick. My thought was that, instead of seemingly showing four Jokers and turning them all into four Aces, I would instead seemingly show four silvery "mirror" cards (similar to those used in "Done With Mirrors," but with mirrored faces instead of backs), and turning them all into four cards featuring photos of my wife printed onto their faces.

I reached out to Bernd (CardMaker) to produce for me the needed gaffs, which he is creating for me at a very reasonable cost.

I'm planning on a "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who's the fairest one of all?" patter approach.

Any advice or suggestions that might further enhance the presentation?

There are three "sides" in NFW -- backs, joker faces and ace faces. Sounds like you are replacing the joker faces with mirrors and the ace faces with your wife's pic. Does that mean the backs will just be card backs? If so I think it would be more interesting to show backs at first with just one mirror face and then eventually turn all the mirrors face-up.. then turn them into your wife's pic. vs showing all mirrors and turning them down into backs.

Sounds like you already have a solid plan which the props are committed to, but I think in general it is an interesting topic... so I'll throw out other ideas...Of course I don't know your Wife, but if was doing something like this for my Wife for a significant anniversary (5, 10, etc), if I wanted to knock it out of the park, the trick would end with the appearance of jewelry for her. i.e. the thoughtfulness of creating a trick for her would be appreciated but...

- Change a dime store ring into a real one
- Mini chop cup with final load a small jewelry box
- Rising card trick but instead of a card, tickets to a favorite performer/event rise out of the deck
- ???

All good ideas, albeit a bit more expensive (great for those "milestone" anniversaries, perhaps).