Bicycle 100% Plastic Cards by Vincenzo Di Fatta

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Bicycle 100% Plastic Cards by Vincenzo Di Fatta

Postby heronjester » Aug 13th, '09, 21:22



The advertising speil

Bicycle 100% Plastic Cards by Vincenzo Di Fatta

Durable, washable plastic playing cards. Each deck has more than 50 hours of continuous play! Printed by the U.S. Playing Card Company. They can be used in any number of card routines. Plastic cards spring back to their original flatness and are very hard to mark or crease. Get more mileage out of these playing cards than a standard deck.


The Effect

Depends what you use them for really.

Cost
£12.50 approx

Difficulty
(1=easy to do, 2=No sleights, but not so easy, 3=Some sleights used,
4=Advanced sleights used, 5=Suitable for experienced magicians only)

1 - 5 depending what you do with them.

Review

If you've performed in pubs you may have come up against sticky beer syndrome, where tabletops are dirty or spectators have sticky fingers which can ruin cards, you might want these. So on a whim I decided to try some plastic cards, thinking that if they do last longer than the conventional cards they might be an investment.

I've had these a while now and have been putting them through their paces to see how they perform and look.

Visually the plastic cards are whiter than the conventional cards, the reds and blues are a little bit duller. The plastic cards are a little bit wider and not quite as tall, (being about 32nd of an inch shorter). The weirdest thing is that they smell of celery!

Good points: they are flexible, look shiny and new after a good deal of work, are good for riffle shuffles, are good for DLs, are quite smooth to handle.

Bad points: not quite so easy for normal shuffling immediately, once you've got a feel for them, then it's better, but not fabulous, not that good for faros unless you get the knack of doing it with this deck, even then you can get it wrong and it all goes to pot! (NB With a normal deck I'm really good at faros.) No c***ping, br**ging, or any physical manipulation of the cards works, they just bounce back to shape. If you have cards signed you might not want to use this deck, the deck would last longer.

The deck can be a bit slippy sometimes. And of course they aren't any gaffs, and a normal gaff would just look wrong used in conjunction with this deck.

One thing I don't like is the fact that the plastic case they come in really isn't strong enough, and they're in a cardboard box inside any way. You can buy fournier plastic boxes though.

I've yet to use them in performance yet, because they just feel a bit weird and I don't feel confident with them.

Overall

I'm really not convinced about these yet. They look good and act well on the whole, but seem too different for me to swap with a normal deck. You might think differently.

I'll use a different method of marking these:

Design 9/10 (They look just like bikes but slight colour variations let them down)
Flexibility 10/10
Usefulness 6/10 (Missing out on some of the 'manipulation')
General magic 'feel' 6/10 (personal opinion)

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heronjester
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Postby IrieMagic » Aug 16th, '09, 15:04

Hi I was just wondering if the feel different to regular Cards.

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Postby SamD465 » Aug 16th, '09, 18:04

I can see how they could be useful, but they are way too expensive considering I don't do that much card magic.

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Postby heronjester » Aug 16th, '09, 19:11

Hi Iriemagic,

They feel a bit thicker and a bit more slippy than conventional cards. I did an experiment, where I held the entire deck of plastic cards in a very strong (death) grip and shook my hand hard - the result, they fell out. However the same experiment with a conventional deck was that they stayed in my hand.

One thing I forgot to put in the review was that they are good for p**ming because if you have sweaty hands that can buckle the cards, this won't happen with these because they keep their shape.

Hi SamD465,

I would have to agree with you.

The jury is still out for me on these cards, and they are expensive. If you have a lot of signatures on them for your act, then (because they last such a long time!) you'd be stuck with them for a long time. And if you give your deck away at the end of the evening as a memento, that could work out to be expensive.

HJ

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