talkmagic.co.uk

Product: Ellusionist Bicycle Ghost Stripper Decks

From: Nothing Up My Sleeve

Price: Belly cut deck £8.20, Hindu cut deck £10.20.

Difficulty: Depends. 1 for a beginner, up to about a 3.5 for serious use.

There’s always something very nice about opening a pristine deck. The smooth, new feel of the cover in your hands as several decks tumble out of the Jiffy pack, breaking the first seal, the perfect, unblemished feel of the cards themselves as they glide against each other, the subtle smell of cellulose, even the decision as to whether you work them over now or leave them be. For stripper deck users, there’s the added pleasure of checking the quality of the various aspects of the gaff.

For those that don’t know, there are two types of stripper deck - belly and Hindu. Without giving anything away, a Hindu deck is “long” and a belly is “short”. Now, I’ve always used strippers made with standard red Bicycle 808 stock, so it was with trepidation that I spent this much. I justified it by saying that they’re for performance only. Sunday best cards, if you like. But, other than the famous “negative” monochrome design, what makes them so special?

For starters, the cards use thicker stock, giving them a more rigid and crisp feel. The edges on my decks are a lot rougher than a normal Bicycle stripper deck. I like this, because it adds to the precise feel against the hands you get form a new deck as you manipulate the cards, and you can certainly feel the extra thickness during a riffle shuffle.

The backs of the cards look somewhat like photographic negatives, which makes them stand out from the pack (pun intended!). Sat in the pub, getting to know the decks over a good lunch, people kept commenting on how unusual they look.

So far so good, but all this doesn’t constitute £8.20 and £10.20 a pop, so what else is special about them? Well, put these decks under ultraviolet (black) light and they fluoresce more than a Saturday Night Slapper in Ibiza. This makes them ideal for bar, club and party work where it may be too noisy to verbally drum up a crowd. Just offer a fanned deck and off you go.

The decks come wrapped in a short instruction sheet printed by Ellusionist, showing how to use the gaff. This contains the basics, as do the instructions given away with other stripper decks. Though one day someone will go a bit deeper with the information contained within these leaflets, until then the difference here is the quality of the card stock and the added fluorescent interest.

So much for these decks being Sunday best cards for performance only. I can’t stop shuffling them and I don’t care. They’re very nice to handle and my middle to bottom overhand shuffle is now perfectly hidden.

Overall:

9/10 – a lovely deck to handle with an understated design and a strong UV effect, but what a price! Mind you, strippers need much less practice than a regular deck, so they should last far longer. Active Talk Magic members also get 10% off at NUMS. Seige hasn’t asked me to say that; it's just a fact that makes the cost 10% more justifiable to your better half when CUPS strikes, and anyway it’s preferable to deal with a UK dealer rather than chance the vagaries of importing them.

I dont wanna write full review on them so almost everything written above also goes for the ghost ID I received today from nums. now im of to eye up this stripper deck.....

down2infinity wrote:now im of to eye up this stripper

ba zing!

I waunder if ellusionist had to pay for the rights to market their own stripper decks. As far as I remember the stripper deck was out long before ellusionist came around.Does this mean that I can make my own stripper decks and sell them at my next garage sale.

Yes magic it does.
But only if you cut them yourself... and designed the cards yourself... and basically everything apart from the gaff idea is your own...

But the gaff is the most important part. Shouldn't the person or the persons family get a cut of the money that people are making off of the cards. I'm just saying this because of all the ethics in magic. How come they never print anything like this in the linking ring.

I see what you're saying magic mate, but it doesn't make any sense.
It's really like saying that whoever made the irst ever deck of cards should get a cut of all money from all decks of cards using the standard 52 cards ever made.

Copyright doesn't work like that I'm afraid.

And above all else, it's probably something you can buy the right to manufacture.

magic8697 wrote:But the gaff is the most important part. Shouldn't the person or the persons family get a cut of the money that people are making off of the cards. I'm just saying this because of all the ethics in magic. How come they never print anything like this in the linking ring.

If anyone knows who invented the stripper principle, I've never found them. They were in use before 1928 when Claude Odin was first describing their use as a gaff deck in France. He didn't invent the idea, so they are certainly older than that date. There are, however, a few references to their original use by card sharps way before that. It may just have been word of mouth to begin with, that was then formalised by a magic dealer as a gaff deck.