The M5 System

Struggling with an effect? Any tips (without giving too much away!) you'd like to share?

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Postby card_shark-19 » Dec 15th, '04, 21:17



if you could describe what it is that would be great because i dont even know what it looks like.

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Postby Happy Toad » Dec 15th, '04, 21:36

Look Cardshark because you are so young I think I'll help you by spelling it out even more than has already been done.

This forum does not and will not expose the secrets of magic. We have all understood your question from the beginning but have no intention of answering you. We are happy to discuss magic in general with you but will not tell you how magic tricks work or what the gimmicks are or look like.

Read some of the threads and you will get the idea of the purpose of this forum.

Regards

Happy Toad

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play" (Peter Lorenzo)
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Postby card_shark-19 » Dec 15th, '04, 21:38

ok sry. Can i ask you if you think it works well?

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Postby card_shark-19 » Dec 15th, '04, 21:42

and my point about the M5 thing was that they could be ripping me off because they didnt even have a picture of it.

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Postby Happy Toad » Dec 15th, '04, 21:43

To answer that we need to know what it is that you would like to achieve with it. Once we know what you want to do, we can give a better answer as to whether it will do the job well.

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Postby card_shark-19 » Dec 15th, '04, 21:46

well i mainly want to do the moving cards and coins without touching them.

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Postby card_shark-19 » Dec 15th, '04, 21:52

do u think those tricks are easy with the M5?

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Postby Mandrake » Dec 15th, '04, 21:57

Very few tricks are actually worth the money charged - the real value is in the secret, the routine, and what you as an individual can do with it.

Some folks can do miracles with an ordinary deck of cards and they cost very little. Whatever you receive under the label of M5 will contain a great deal of promise and potential - it won't contain a lot of fancy self working equipment. Why not e-mail Brad Christian at ellusionist and ask him what he can tell you about M5- he's one of the guys who stock and distribute them and, as an existing customer, you might just get some answers to your questions.

Best of luck and don't give up the day job - magic rarely pays the bills unless your name is Copperfield, Blaine, Burton etc!

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Postby card_shark-19 » Dec 15th, '04, 22:17

thanks. but i have another question. Someone that i know told me that the M5 is hard to conceal whil you're doing the trick. Is this true?

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Postby Mandrake » Dec 16th, '04, 00:28

You'll be able to deal with that issue when you get the gizmo. Some things can be used whilst wearing tee shirts etc. whereas other items need you to be wearing a bit more than that. Go through the instructions and take note of what they say but don't be afraid to experiment and change things to suit you and you alone.

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Postby caubeck » Dec 16th, '04, 14:32

Hi Card Shark,

I give English classes in Spain, often to really young children. A few years ago I was giving classes to a little kid who had a toy tank. He really liked it, but it was a bit boring. You could push it or pull it or drop it down the stairs but that was about it. It wouldn't move on its own.

Then one day I realised that the tank was made so that if you put a couple of batteries in it, the cannon would light up and the wheels would move it along the floor. Of course the boy knew what batteries were as there were two in the remote control for the TV but he had no idea you could put them in the tank to make it move. He thought batteries were boring metal things that just made the TV and alarm clocks work. Well, he was 5 years old, what do you expect?

Anyway, I took the batteries out of the TV remote control (or clock, I don't remember now) and put them in the bottom of the tank. It lit up and beeped and ran across the table. He was amazed! He'd had that toy for ages and never knew it could come alive. At first he thought I'd done one of my usual tricks! In the end his parents bought him a packet of duracells to keep it going. He was so pleased, and he never saw batteries in quite the same way again.

Now, an M5 is like that. It's not a battery, it's something else. If you see it you know what it is. It's just bigger or smaller or duller or shinier than the ones you normally see, and that's why they can sell it as something "new" and people buy it. It's like batteries: they're totally normal, but if you use them in ways people don't expect they do things people didn't think were possible.

A lot of stuff you buy in magic is like that. Someone says "Buy my new device, it's just 50 quid and you can do marvels with it!" When you get it you suddenly realise you already had one of those in the garage, the shop next door sells them for 1 pound 50, and everyone knows it's something completely ordinary and boring. Maybe it's just a paperclip and a bit of nylon stuck to a Bic pen. But when you read the instructions it tells you how to use it in a totally original way that will amaze everyone! That's why you're paying for the secret, not the material itself.

You might think that's a rip-off (oh and be careful as magicians also use the word "rip-off" to mean something copied illegally from someone else and sold without their permission). You might think, "I spent 50 quid on that when I could have made one for 20p!!??" But actually it happens all the time. Just think: when you buy a book or comic, what are you really buying - the sheets of paper or what's written on it? That's how magic works, too. Magic is reading plus imagination and then practice. The plastic thing you get in the box has to be well made but it's not always amazing in itself.

So if people don't tell you what an M5 is exactly don't be surprised. The money they paid is probably in the telling, not in the device. I can tell you from my experience that the object it comes with is better than whatever I have lying around in my garage, but it's not very exciting. In fact I know I can get one a lot cheaper, but that's something you have to accept when you take up magic as a hobby.

Regards,

Chris

Last edited by caubeck on Dec 16th, '04, 16:24, edited 1 time in total.
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Postby caubeck » Dec 16th, '04, 15:48

As far as hiding the thing is concerned, I can tell you that I do use this, and I worked out how to hide it pretty well. It took a lot of playing around with but now, dressed normally, I can make it work for me. You don't need a suit to perform.

The M5 won't, however, automatically make you look as cool as the guy in the ellusionist video unless:

you dress in black and wear dark sunglasses;

you stand on top of tall buildings;

you speak quite slowly and use words like "shut off" and "system" and "training" even when it's not entirely appropriate...

Hey, do they give you a free Matrix DVD with the M5 at that site? :)

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Postby slicknick » May 24th, '05, 14:40

actually you can do the same tricks with the little magnet wich is in an gearbox of a car. They use te magnet to collect little parts of metal from the oil so it's very strong en really small. It cost about 4 dollars.
I have no clue how the M5 works, all I know is that you don't need a complicated expensive device to do about the same tricks.

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Postby Mark Waddington » May 24th, '05, 15:47

caubeck wrote:Hi Card Shark,

I give English classes in Spain, often to really young children. A few years ago I was giving classes to a little kid who had a toy tank. He really liked it, but it was a bit boring. You could push it or pull it or drop it down the stairs but that was about it. It wouldn't move on its own.

Then one day I realised that the tank was made so that if you put a couple of batteries in it, the cannon would light up and the wheels would move it along the floor. Of course the boy knew what batteries were as there were two in the remote control for the TV but he had no idea you could put them in the tank to make it move. He thought batteries were boring metal things that just made the TV and alarm clocks work. Well, he was 5 years old, what do you expect?

Anyway, I took the batteries out of the TV remote control (or clock, I don't remember now) and put them in the bottom of the tank. It lit up and beeped and ran across the table. He was amazed! He'd had that toy for ages and never knew it could come alive. At first he thought I'd done one of my usual tricks! In the end his parents bought him a packet of duracells to keep it going. He was so pleased, and he never saw batteries in quite the same way again.

Now, an M5 is like that. It's not a battery, it's something else. If you see it you know what it is. It's just bigger or smaller or duller or shinier than the ones you normally see, and that's why they can sell it as something "new" and people buy it. It's like batteries: they're totally normal, but if you use them in ways people don't expect they do things people didn't think were possible.

A lot of stuff you buy in magic is like that. Someone says "Buy my new device, it's just 50 quid and you can do marvels with it!" When you get it you suddenly realise you already had one of those in the garage, the shop next door sells them for 1 pound 50, and everyone knows it's something completely ordinary and boring. Maybe it's just a paperclip and a bit of nylon stuck to a Bic pen. But when you read the instructions it tells you how to use it in a totally original way that will amaze everyone! That's why you're paying for the secret, not the material itself.

You might think that's a rip-off (oh and be careful as magicians also use the word "rip-off" to mean something copied illegally from someone else and sold without their permission). You might think, "I spent 50 quid on that when I could have made one for 20p!!??" But actually it happens all the time. Just think: when you buy a book or comic, what are you really buying - the sheets of paper or what's written on it? That's how magic works, too. Magic is reading plus imagination and then practice. The plastic thing you get in the box has to be well made but it's not always amazing in itself.

So if people don't tell you what an M5 is exactly don't be surprised. The money they paid is probably in the telling, not in the device. I can tell you from my experience that the object it comes with is better than whatever I have lying around in my garage, but it's not very exciting. In fact I know I can get one a lot cheaper, but that's something you have to accept when you take up magic as a hobby.

Regards,

Chris


I completely agree with everything you are saying, but id never thought of it in such a way, i mean, id thought of it that way, but not to so much detail.

This guy knows his stuff guys!

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