talkmagic.co.uk

The Effect
I'm not going to put the effect here because there are 100s possible. With my version of this affect I recieved two effects but no real routines so.

Cost
Ouch, £40.00 (plus postage) on the last check at cards for magic. searching around I found a nice dealers (pm me if you want details) in the States who with are glorious exchange rate sold me the deck for £25 inc postage. Still hefty for a deck of bicycle cards though.

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. Easy, if you can shuffle a deck your away.

Review
I came across this deck on a Banacheck tape, sorry I forget which. Basically this is a forcing deck. No roughs or smooths, short or long. The deck can be fanned face up or down, roughly ribbon spread in the hands, face up or down, shuffled & cut to the spectators delight & the spec can cut the deck also.

The force can work with the riffle deal, or cards spread from hand to hand, or just get the spec to cut as many times as they want, the card touched is the card used.

As said it's a forcing deck & 100% in its force.
You can concentrate on the routine with only the slightest of thought to the handling.

On the downside the cards aren't examinable, you'll need to deck switch if you go into other card based routines & you can't repeat on the same person/crowd.

On the plus side the cards are thouroghly shown as different & the card openly touched/chosen is the card used
Overall
That's a hard choice to say, for what it is I love it. No worrying at all. If your a pro who has no concerns about forcing a card then this isn't for you, while I'm happy to force a card proper like I find this way can allow someone of my newbie level to breathe more.

I'm going to ignore the cost in my rating & give this 7 super Slitheeen farts out of a possible ten!

If you have to do a deck switch, why not just do a trick with a regular deck, in which by default the cards are seen to be regular and then just switch in a forcing deck ie all one card. These forcing decks can be bought for around a fiver. From the specs point of view they have clearly seen the deck is regular and you can now force a card in the fairest possible manner.

When done but the forcing deck in your pocket and either do a non card trick before returning to cards or feign you are about to do that before changing your mind and bringing the cards out of your pocket again.

If you have to do a deck switch, why not just do a trick with a regular deck

You can certainly do this if you like.

For me this adds the gap where your switching the deck & is unessasary with the Monte Christo deck as you can display the faces & then go straight into the routine, but yes if your happy deck switching it'll save you quite a few pennies & if your happy deck switching then your probably 100% happy forcing so this deck ain't for you.

It's possible to do things with this particular deck which would impossible with a regular one or with a (for example) one-way forcing deck. Marc Paul gives a good application of it in his lecture notes. Available from the US fake card expert http://www.cardsbymartin.com/site.htm

I am fascinated by this thread, and hungry for more thoughts on this Deck !

Piers.

Not really sure what else can be added here Piers,

Alan Jackson can you give a link to these lecture notes by Marc Paul. Would you recommend buying these lecture notes, of course it depends on how much they are?

Marc Paul's notes are worth getting hold of although you should pay for these as they're not given away freely.

Secondly, there should be no reason to do a deck swap if this deck is presented correctly as the force is SO natural as to not leave any suspicion that the specs choice isn't totally randon.

Thanks!

I saw Marc Paul lecture about a year ago, and enjoyed it very much.

I shall try to get a copy ( original ) of his notes.

Piers.

hmm i dont really understand this deck. i dont think its similar to the mindpower deck. if this is a forcing deck, what kind of effects do you want to achieve with it. mentalism effects?

The problem with most of the cheaper forcing decks is that the cards can't be inspected at all as the secret is then out of the bag.

The Monte Cristo deck is more cunning in that it can be shown in a particular way to be a normal deck so that the spec see's ALL 52 cards as different - yet the same card is always forced wherever it is selected in the pack.

I won't expand on this any further in danger of revealing which would be very unfair to those that have spent their money.

I'd say that this particular deck is very suitable for mentalist type card effects, perhaps the MOST suited gimmicked deck. Quality comes at a price.

but the mindpower deck seems good too, and its 40usd. i have been tryin to find some good mentalism effects to come with ET but now im just so confused of which one to get @_@

I don't have the mind power deck so can't comment on it, is it a forcing deck? This is essentially what the MC deck is although the version I got came with two routines.

There's not a lot to add to the fact that a forcing deck it is, there's tons of mentalism effects you can do if you can force a card, (there's tons you can do if you can't)

I'm a lot more confident nowadays with forcing but if I want something that looks so natural & fair then yes I'll pull out the MC deck.

the MC deck somehow is very similar to the mindpower deck i guess. the mindpower deck is basically also a forcing deck for some mentalism routines. you can easily guess what the 3 cards 3 different person are thinking after some questions with the deck. can you provide me with a link to the MC deck?

I found this link - http://www.magic.org/store/product_info ... ts_id=1575

The Monte Cristo deck will be available (soon) again!

http://www.magicbycardmaker.com/pageID_5072752.html

There you can find a free! download with routines.
They are good for the recently published Mastermind Deck too.

Have fun.