Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a magic book review. Hey today we're gonna look at a thought well stolen from Ben Harris. What is this? Basically, it's one trick, right? It's one trick 31 page soft back booklet. If you don't know Ben Harris, he's a really prolific, very creative magic inventor. He's got, hold on the head, he's got Exit 51, solid gold, easy action and Alita was one of the first tricks I ever purchased from him. This trick, okay, so there's no commercial for it. I can't show you the commercial and the ad copy is kind of kind of all over the place. I don't know. And so I thought I just run it down for you real quick just so that you know what goes on in the effect. All right, so let's say you've got two decks of playing cards. They're both just displayed for the spectator and you can tell the spectator they can and they can take any deck. All right, so there's no equivocator. They literally can take any deck they want. Then you have the spectator think of a card, okay? Not select a card. They think of a card. They think of any card they want and then with their face down deck, you have them give it several cuts. So obviously they're moving the cards around. They can stop wherever they would like. Then the cards are dealt one at a time face up onto the table and the spectator secretly notes to themselves at what number, okay, what position the card they're thinking of is that. And this is something that all the spectators going to know you're not going to know you're not going to have any clue at this point, okay? Still nothing said nothing's written down. There's no billets. There's nothing like that, okay? Then you'll square all the cards on the table and you leave it there for a second. Then you the magician you remove your deck, okay? And you give it a quick shuffle and a couple of cuts. And then you ask the spectator to think of their favorite card again and then you just stare into their eyes. Then the magician runs through the deck with the cards facing themselves and they remove one card and they place it face down on the table so that nobody can see it, okay? So we don't know what that card is at the moment. Then you ask the spectator to think of the number. So they thought of the face value of the card. Now they think of the number of where their card is in the deck. And then the magician takes that face down card and kind of cuts the deck and puts it inside. And now what you do is you tell the spectator to deal down through their deck one at a time stopping at their favorite card, okay? So they count their cards down, done, done, done, done, done. Let's say they just stop at, you know, the 19th card, okay? They stop at the 19th card. Then the magician also deals down their deck, one at a time in Unison, and the magician stops at the 19th card also. Then you have the spectator name their card, obviously, and then both of you flip your 19th cards together and they match. And that really is kind of like the rundown of the trick and on a surface level that seems fair. And it seems like, wow, that's a really cool trick. And here's the thing though, even as I told it to you in your head, you were probably already thinking of a way to do this trick. You probably were, because I was, when I first read the ad copy, I was thinking, well, if I did the trick, I would use this really old method. And I would do it like this. So when I got it in the mail and read the book, I was surprised that it was the method I was thinking of. So is it what I thought? It is what I thought. It's exactly what I thought. It's an old method, okay? And I was kind of surprised that that was the method that Ben used. Ben does give you some really creative ways to disguise that method. And I will say through that that as far as how much practice it requires, the ad copy does say the soft working, like a soft working, okay? True, but it would really help if you knew some very convincing false shuffles and false cuts, okay? That is going to sell this more than anything. I think if you do it as a soft working trick and they do teach you a false cut, that's fine. But I think if you, the more you can make it look like, it's fairly shuffled the better. Can it be inspected? You can inspect this because it's real decks. You're using real decks. There's no gaps. There's no gimmicks, nothing like that. There's no extras, okay? These are real decks. And so all the method is done in the presentation and in the setup. So as far as how much setup and reset is there, there are two decks and they have to both be in a deck stack. Now, take all of that information in and then you come up with what are some of the drawbacks to that. Well, it's a powerful effect. It is a powerful effect and so it does lend itself as a good closer. It lends itself as a great closer, but you can't do it as a closer because unless you've never, unless you don't do any card tricks before this up into this point, like you could do another trick, another trick, another trick, and then this card trick, but you can't do card tricks up into this point because both decks have to be in a deck stack. So that's kind of a draw away. So this kind of has to then be an opener, right? And then the other bad taste of my mouth was, well, it's two decks. I have to have two decks on my person in a deck stack to do this trick. So that, I didn't love either. And plus the fact that I kind of guessed the trick before I even got it, didn't love that either. And part of the ad copy makes it seem like this is all like mental. Like the spectator just thinks of a card and you just, you just know what it is and you both count down to the cards together and that doesn't really happen. And it does say you don't ask a spectator any questions and that's kind of true, but then it's kind of not because you do kind of have to say, well, what number is the card at so that you know where to deal to. You can't deal to an imaginary number if you don't know what the number is. So there's a little bit of that as well. And so there was even though it doesn't sound like equivocate, it come, it still is equivocate. So once you say it's equivocate, what you say it's a deck stack and what you say it's an old method, then it's kind of like, yeah, yeah, I know how to do this trick like I or I could make up my own version of this trick. Not that Ben's version is bad. It's not. I love Ben's version. It's a great trick. It does still have impact on us. If I was going to say something positive about it, let's say something positive. Ben Harris has created a fun two-deck effect that is sure to please fans of self-working magic. But is it worth your money? Is it worth your money? I would have to say no. It's 30 bucks. It's 30 bucks for a 31-page soft-back booklet. I've bought hard-back books for $30 that contained hundreds of magic tricks. Magic tricks this good. Okay, on par with this, I've bought DVDs for $30 that had 10, 12, 15 self-working effects. So one self-working effect in a 31-page soft-back booklet for $30. Adds hard for me to recommend this. I like the trick. I do. I think Ben Harris is a great creator, great inventor and all of that, but price point wise, wow, it just doesn't add up to a lot of the other material that's out there on the market today. All right, so that is my review of a thought well stolen from Ben Harris and wow, bound. I want to thank Murphy's Magic for allowing me to have this trick so that I can do the review for you. And if you would like to purchase this trick for yourself, you can find it from your very favorite Murphy's Magic dealer. Thanks, bye.