If you like simple to learn and pretty impressive card tricks, then you've come to the right place. You'll be able to perform this trick after only a few minutes practice. It does require a little bit of set up before you face your audience, so you can only do this trick once. This is popular with kids, as it doesn't require any high level sleight of hand skills.

This is how the trick will seem to your shocked audience. You take three Aces: Spades, Clubs, and Diamonds. You hold them out, showing them to the audience. Then you put them on top of the deck, and jumble up and cut the deck quite a lot of times, making sure that they have been uniformly dispersed.

You then ask a helper to come up and hunt for the Ace of Diamonds. They will look in vain, as they won't be able to locate it. If you like, you can get a different audience member to come up and look, but they too will be disastrous. Then you pull the Ace of Diamonds out of your shirt pocket. (Or your back pocket, or shoe, or wherever.)

Here's how to set the ruse up. First unearth all the Aces. Then put the Ace of Diamonds in your pocket (or shoe or wherever) beforehand. Then leave the other Aces on top of the deck. When you drag the three Aces off the top, and fan them out, make sure to hold the Ace of Hearts in the heart. If you locate both other cards on either side of the Ace of Hearts, it will look like the Ace of Diamonds to the audience.

How you expression this is important. If you mention beforehand that you are going to make the Ace of Diamonds cease to exist, they will be looking much more directly. But if you just start of by unfolding what you are doing, and then name the three cards (Ace of Clubs, Spades, and Diamonds) they will likely believe you, and not search too closely at the three cards.

One way that can amazingly help is as you are shuffling and cutting the deck, is to convey some long winded story about how diamonds have some kind of astonishing power, and in the old days when they were choosing the shapes for cards, they almost didn't choose diamonds because people were always stealing them, or they were always disappearing or something. That way, when they start wondering about the Ace of Diamonds, it will already be buried someplace in the deck, or so they suppose. Have fun with this trick.