Mailbag: Black Friday New Releases
/I’m interested to hear what your thoughts were on the Black Friday new releases this year. I don’t mean your thoughts on the deals, but on the tricks themselves. Were there any that you picked up? I have a tendency to get seduced by the sales and not think clearly and end up with a bunch of tricks I never use lol. —CT
As of yet, I haven’t picked up any of the new Black Friday releases from Penguin or Vanishing Inc. Like you, I have a tendency to ignore my critical thinking and just buy stuff because there is some deal or rewards during Black Friday. This year I decided to wait and see.
But here, briefly, were my initial thoughts on the releases:
From Penguin
Card to Wallet isn’t really a premise that appeals to me that much. For that reason, I didn’t even really give this much consideration.
From my understanding, these are essentially marked poker chips. I like the marking system used. But I can’t get over the fact that poker chips are already marked. They’re different colors. That’s almost literally the whole point of poker chips. While I think I could maybe justify these presentationally, that’s not something I really want to do. So this isn’t on my to-buy list.
Vanishes are so impossible that they generate a lot of heat on things. And unless a vanish is profoundly clean, I feel people tend to dismiss it. In this case you have a deck of cards that is displayed a little death-grip-y which goes into an object (a card clip) that is a total anomaly for people outside of magic. While I think the vanish looks nice, I do think there’s a good chance people will just assume there was something funny about the deck and the card clip. So it’s not for me.
This is a marked deck of cards with Heroes and their corresponding Villains. There is also a book test element to the information on the front of the card. I’ll end getting this one. I’m not sure what I’ll do with it yet. I’m not a big fan of doing lots of different tricks with these special decks. I think that is more likely to suggest they’re special magic cards.
If you say, “I saw these at the dollar store last week and I had an idea for something we might be able to try with them,” that feels “real” to me.
Whereas, “I’m going to do a full act with this ordinary deck of Heroes and Villains cards” feels like, “Here’s my trick deck of Heroes and Villains cards.”
But I don’t doubt I’ll find one or two ideas that really work well with these.
I think this looks pretty great and would totally shock people if done casually and impromptu.
My issue is just that I’m probably not going to carry around a gimmick for something that should feel like a spontaneous moment of visual magic. So I don’t see myself getting this.
I love the concept of secret writing devices and the number of different effects you can do with one.
That being said, I’ve never been 100% happy with one either and so I try out each one that gets released. I’ll be picking this one up too.
Vanishing Inc.
This is Angelo’s fabled “any freely named card” version of the rising card. I will likely get this. Although here are some things to think of…
I got an email last week that asked:
I just saw the trailer for Carbone’s Notion of Motion. It looks like such a powerful effect, but to my taste way too “on the nose” to be as magically beautiful as it could be.
Do you have any thoughts on a “casual magic wrap around” for it? —BK
The email makes a good point. As magicians there is a depth to this trick, because we approach it with the understanding of how the Rising Card traditionally works. So there’s that higher level of interest. But for normal, non-magicians I don’t know that it has much more resonance than any other version of the Rising Card.
In fact, what if we use the Green Grass Test and imagine a world where this version of the Rising Card had been around for 100 years and then somebody came out with a “new” version. The new version could be done with a borrowed, shuffled deck, and the card could rise when the magician wasn’t even holding the pack. (Which is what’s possible with many standard versions of the rising card.) Would we not be thinking of that as the exciting new advancement in method?
I don’t know. It’s just a thought experiment. I’ll definitely pick this up and let you know if I come up with anything particularly interesting for it presentationally.
I think this looks really good, but if I do something super visual with cards that can’t be examined, I don’t know how to get people to not think, “Let me see those cards.”
So for that reason, I won’t be picking this up.
I know other performers feel they can get away with this stuff, but I can’t.
Mortenn’s Jumbo Card
This looks pretty clean. But ultimately, the effect is a card prediction. I have more of those than I need.
I’ve been waiting for this to come out for a long time. I don’t know if I’ll adopt his “system.” But I’m a fan of Josh’s and I’m always curious to study his thinking, so I’ll be interested to see what I might be able to take from this to possibly incorporate into my own work.
So yeah, those were my initial thoughts while going through the Black Friday new releases. It’s certainly possible I won’t like something I decided to get or that I’ll loop back around and end up picking up something I originally dismissed. We’ll see in time.