A.F.W. (Another F**king Wallet) by Wayne Dobson

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A.F.W. (Another F**king Wallet) by Wayne Dobson

Postby Sexton Blake » Sep 21st, '17, 17:22



The Effect
A.F.W. (Another F**king Wallet) by Wayne Dobson

Cost
By FAR the cheapest place is:
http://www.saturnmagic.co.uk/saturn-mag ... 47241.html
where it's £24.99 (with free shipping).

They say

A complete close-up set contained in one wallet.

5 killer effects from the fertile mind of Wayne Dobson contained in an exquisite leather wallet, made with the highest quality leather.

Heads Up - A mentalist's take on the classic game!

Mental All Backs - A spectator is shown a deck of cards which has been printed with only a back design on both sides. The spectator thinks of any card. The deck magically prints into a normal deck, however one card is missing. The spectator's thought up card is found in the wallet!

Missing Think - A packet of cards are shown to the spectator and a card is chosen, the card is then mixed back into the packet and the magician chooses a card. They match. The card is then put back into the packet and mixed by the spectator. The spectator deals the cards face up and the chosen card has disappeared. Only to be found in the magician's wallet!

Money Warp - A bank note is borrowed and signed by the spectator. A business card is introduced and examined. The note is placed into the business card and is magically wiped clean. The magician opens the wallet to get another bank note, only to find it's the spectator's signed bank note!

Personal FX - An updated version of a Wayne Dobson classic!
Genuine leather wallet!
5 killer effects!
Unique system to gain information instantly!
No impression device!
No chemicals!
No electronics!
Just One Wallet

SUC principle used with kind permission by Mark Strivings.


I say

It's a darling little thing - little, in that it's not a full-sized wallet, it's more a business card/credit card wallet (though it does contain a magnet so I'd advise against using it to store your actual credit cards). It's curiously unsuspicious, however; I don't think you need to put store cards (or whatever) in it to suggest that it's an everyday object. It works, without drawing heat, as simply a nice little wallet in which you're holding/protecting a few things - a small-ish number of playing cards, perhaps, or bits of card to write on, or some Post-its - with which you can do a trick or several. It think the key here, psychologically, is the location of the 'with'. As an analogy, if you introduce a Wow sleeve, say, however you explain or try to justify it, the heat on it is scorching. Whereas, if you take out an envelope, pull three cards from it, and perform a packet trick of some kind, there's no heat at all on the envelope at all. You're doing the trick with the Wow, but the envelope is incidental; you're doing the trick with the cards, so they get the heat. The AFW (certainly when doing the effects which come with it as standard) feels much more like that envelope.

I won't describe the all included effects fully, as the They Say outlines above (plus a video on the Saturn page - and elsewhere - which gives a brief, silent, run-through of them) does a passable job.

Apart from Heads Up and Personal FX where the descriptions tell you next to nothing.

In the Heads Up effect, the spec writes a three-digit number on a Post-it note, and sticks it on your forehead (where, obviously, you can't see it), then you write on a Post-it note and stick it on theirs. (It's like the game where a group of you each have a person written on a note stuck to your forehead and you have to guess who you 'are'.) You try to guess the number they've written; you get pretty close, but the spec tells you you're actually one off. You check the note on your forehead to confirm. When the spec checks the note on their forehead it says, "Off by one." This is a nice, quirky trick. In this form, I'd say it's better done one-to-one simply because if there's a group then they'll know, because they can see, the kicker ending from the beginning. There are perhaps other effects one could do using the method where the fact that everyone in the group except the spec with the note on their head knows the ending is actually part of the theatre. In any case, the method doesn't limit you to only one-to-one (it is somewhat angle-sensitive, but not unduly) nor to revealing only a written number.

Personal FX is in appearance very like the Free Will effect, or its variants (Will to Read, etc.), though the method is different. You place three (business, let's say) cards face down on the table; the spec places a phone on one card, some keys on another, and the final card is placed on top of the wallet (not inside the wallet: onto the wallet, remaining (near) fully visible, kept in place by a shallow card-holding pocket). The cards are then shown to perfectly match the spec's free choices - the card under the phone says, 'Phone', the one under the keys says, 'Keys' and the one on the wallet says, 'Wallet'. It's as clean as that; it's what's shown in some demos online, and is what the spec sees. If you're lucky. You don't need to be very lucky, but you do need an quite decent amount of luck. If you're not lucky, then it''s not quite that clean and direct. You'll need to do a brief extra 'phase'. This is not what you'd prefer, but it will seem consistent, and fair, and - if you've got that kind of spec - might even appear to be allowing the spec to make even more free choices. (Also, even a suspicious, reverse-engineering-later spec, will not be able to work out the trick from deconstructing the extra phase - for one thing, there's another part to the method, and for another they don't know it's an extra phase; their believing it's what always happens muddies the waters severely). Also, there's some 'what they see' visual sleight of hand involved. This sleight is ground-level basic, though, utterly easy to do, and - most importantly - perfectly obscured by the routining anyway.

So, this is a sweet item. An innocent-looking leather wallet, that enables you to perform a wide variety of effects - five of which are given to you via the 41min 30sec instructional video download. But lots of other effects besides, which you can think up yourself, using your mind.

On the subject of other effects, there's something very weird here. The AFW comes with the SUC feature. However, it appears to have come with this feature... erm... accidentally. You can use it as SUC wallet. Absolutely. No problem. The webpage tells you: "SUC principle used with kind permission by Mark Strivings." But this feature is not mentioned, at any point, during the instructional video. The physical thing involved is discussed, multiple times... but it's used in a different way, for entirely different ends. The ends, I've little doubt, for which it was built into the wallet at all. This leads to the curious situation that with the AFW you have a - very nice, actually - SUC wallet but, if you don't know about the SUC principle anyway, then you will not learn it - or even hear it hinted at - from anything you get with the AFW itself. I can understand the genesis of this situation - having ploughed through the AFW thread at the Magic Cafe (in which Mr Abby Dunford is correct from the off and, despite allegations to the contrary, just gets correcter as the discussion progresses). Yet, now it's all been resolved, it's perhaps time for an update to the instructional video that, you know, mentions the hugely splendid thing included that it's currently not telling you about.

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 - with the usual caveat that, though nothing will tax your fingers, if you''re a febrile, thoughtless buffoon performance-wise the wallet won't get around that.

Overall

9/10. Lovely. No regrets whatsoever about buying this. How many magic purchases can one say that about, eh?

As a PS, I bought my AFW from Saturn, as per the link at the top. I did this purely because they were selling it at about half the price other places were. (I think I've bought one other thing from them in the past, and certainly have no personal association with them whatsoever.) I bought it as a birthday present for myself. This meant I bought it in June, but didn't actually open the box until my 114th birthday in September. When I did open the box, I discovered there was a manufacturing fault with my wallet. This was clearly way beyond any 30-day returns policy - June to September. But, more in hope than expectation, I fired off an email to Saturn, explaining the situation, and asking if I could return my wallet for a replacement. Within hours I got a reply from Mark 'Saturn' Traversoni, saying he'd send out another AFW the moment the new stock came in, and that I need not go to the expense and bother of returning my faulty one - I could just keep it. (It has a very serious flaw, but - and Mr T would be aware of this - is still usable for multiple effects. Or merely for holding cards on which I've written uplifting epigrams to glance at throughout the day in an attempt to hold off plunging existential despair for another hour or two.) A few days later, my (this time perfect) AFW arrived. One simply has to highlight this level of service. Well done Saturn: I forgive you now for destroying Cassini.

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Sexton Blake
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