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Recollector

Gea, Miguel Angel

Murphy's Magic Supplies, Inc.

(Based on 1 review)
The card to box trick is a staple in card magic and is coveted by magi all over the world. Now Miguel Gea has taken the card to box plot and added a powerful punch to make the final card to box phase clean and visually unexplainable.

Two cards are simply secured in your card box, while the spectator picks their card. Their card is lost in the deck to immediately find it transported into the box, wedged between the original two cards.

To raise the stakes, the trick happens again, and this time the magician never comes anywhere near the box!

ReCollector raises the bar with every phase of the routine and everything can be examined by your spectators!

Reviews

Dr. J. M. Ayala De Cedoz

Official Reviewer

Oct 15, 2015

There are a lot of products out there that are not great, but not awful either. This one falls in that category.

This is one of those products that really frustrates me because I really enjoy the work of Miguel Angel Gea - he is not only a fellow Spaniard but he is a very talented performer and a great thinker. I think this product ended up as filler material and it should have been just that - one of the 'other' effects on a DVD of multiple effects, for which the gaffed card is included.

First of all you never see Miguel on this DVD anywhere - all you ever see is Chris Oberle. When you put the disc in the player, the DVD just starts up with the Murphy's Magic Black Label intro, and then it goes right into the studio where Chris performs the effect for the cousin to Thing from the Addams Family (the cousin being an arm from behind the camera), then explaining it.

The video, audio and lighting quality are all very good and the instructions are clear, though they are a tad repetitive. There is no menu at all - nada. The video just starts up and ends, 20 minutes and 59 seconds later, just as suddenly as it began.

The gaff is standard Bicycle quality and if you ever need to replace it, it is a common gaff and you can buy a whole deck of them for $10-15/USD.

Chris does teach the handling thoroughly, though I am not sure it really adds much of anything original to the effect. The ad copy is accurate, but there is one little tiny part where it says it "...raises the bar with every step of the routine and everything can be examined by your spectators!" This makes it sound like there are multiple phases to this thing - there are not. There are only two. The claim that everything is examinable is not quite true because if you take the statement from the context of the ad copy, it sounds like everything is examinable at the end. It is not. They can however examine things before you begin.

They cannot examine the gaff card, obviously. You do NOT end clean at all because the gaffed card ends up in the box at the end. Chris shows you one way of making the deck look clean at the end but you are left to your own devices to figure out how to get rid of the gaff at the end.

He also teaches a basic riffle force and two easy card productions for the beginning. Experienced card workers will likely already know the force and both productions.

My problem with this whole thing is that the first phase is not as clean as some sleight-of-hand methods that have been published in the past, but it does work. The second and final phase (transposition) is clean in appearance - you never go anywhere near the box with the deck before removing the sandwiched card.

I recommend that if you do use this method for a Card to Box, find a different handling for the first phase, then find a different way to effect the vanish and display for the second phase. While you are at it, you might as well devise a way to clean up completely at the end - many of the other methods for this plot from over the years will satisfy one or all of these issues.

For what you are getting, $9.95/USD is alright, but as I have already said, this would have been better as part of a larger DVD of effects with the gaff included. Though the final transposition is clean, it does not warrant a one-trick DVD, at any price. There are other versions out there that look just as clean and use no gaffs at all.

It feels like this whole thing was just thrown together without much though for anything, so with everything taken in consideration, I have to go right up the middle with this one...

2.5 stars.
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