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Deceive

SansMinds Creative Lab

SansMinds Productionz

(Based on 1 review)
SansMinds Creative Lab team is always pushing boundaries in revolutionary ways to enhance audience experiences.

SansMinds is proud to present to you Deceive. A revolution in spectator's hand card change that not only the spectator you are performing for can feel the magic, everyone around can SEE the visual change too!

Text description doesn't justify how powerful this is. Check out the trailer, NOW!

* Fully customizable with your favorite playing card designs
* Package includes gimmick material

* TV rights not included with purchase. Please contact SansMinds for TV rights.

Reviews

Dr. J. M. Ayala De Cedoz

Official Reviewer

Jan 23, 2017

Another SansMinds product. How will this one fare?

First off the DVD quality is top notch, as most SansMinds DVDs are. They know how to make a really good, professional DVD - the lighting, audio and video quality are excellent. The menu is nicely laid out and easy to navigate with a Play All button with the option of watching chapter by chapter if you like. Speaking of the DVD: the ad trailer is narrated by Chris who, as always, seems annoyingly hyped up on something. Bring it down a notch, dude.

The ad copy is not deceptive but the bit about it being "revolutionary" is questionable.

That said, there are some arts and crafts necessary with this product. You get one aspect of the gimmick included with the DVD, the rest you will have to buy yourself. The gimmick should take about 10 or 15 minutes to make and is a type of a very common card gaff out there. You can figure out which type by watching the video trailer.

There is a live performance on the streets of the main effect and as most of their demo videos do, this looks pretty good the way they shot it, however there are some caveats which I will get to later.

Herman does a good job at teaching the making of the gimmick and how to perform the basic effect and one of its variations. The effect itself is not hard to do and there are two versions taught, as well as the aforementioned variation.

Now for the gimmick: No matter how well you make this gimmick you will have plenty of angle considerations, despite what they say in the video. Yes, there are ways to hide it, but this cannot be done surrounded. They say on the DVD case that it has a 180-degree performing angle - I am not quite sure that is the case but if you are very careful, I can see it being 180. More of a concern with this gimmick are the spectators that are right in front of you and slightly off to your side.

When the gimmick is closed there is a very good possibility that they will see something that is absolutely not right with the gimmick just because of its thickness. You can hide this with your thumb but the rest of the time you need some audience management skills to hide it.

When the gimmick is open and at the point where they are supposed to hold onto the card, if they are standing at the right angle, they *will* see that something is not right with the card, though at that point the thickness is not the problem. In case you are wondering, yes, they do actually hold onto the gimmick (via their thumb and index finger) right before the change, which brings me to another point:

You have to have some good judgement with your audiences because if they are holding it too tightly when you go to affect the change, they can cause the gimmick to rip. If it does not rip then a tight grip might cause you to have too much difficulty in affecting the change smoothly/quickly enough. If they are not holding tight enough, you may pull everything out of their fingers.

One other thing - Herman mentions that you should perform this in certain situations with more ideal lighting/blocking. Even then I doubt it would be enough to hide the "something wrong" with the cards.

The visual nature of this method is undeniable and if it works all the time, it would be a very powerful thing for your audience because it happens in their hands.

I think this is better suited to video/camera/TV work because you have much better control over what the audience at large sees, but guess what? TV rights are not included and you have to contact SansMinds for these rights. Oh come on! SansMinds: GET OVER YOURSELVES! The only real reason you would ever deny TV rights these days, aside from some truly original works, is because something looks like crap!

For what you are getting this is priced just a tad too high, however, it could definitely have been worse.

2 stars and even those are for the video and teaching quality.
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