Spontaneous combustion is a good card trick with a cool patter about spontaneous human combustion and the ability to harness heat in your fingertips. The gimmick is similar to Jay Sankey’s In A Flash, but with a different story line, minus the flash paper. Here, as the magician fans the cards on both sides, to show that it is a normal deck, he asks a spectator to choose a card and then sign it. The card is lost in the middle of the deck and the magician rubs his fingers together and tells the spectators about the ability to focus energy and heat in your fingertips so that he can bend metal or burn other materials. While holding the deck, he shows that his fingers penetrate through and sink into the cards until he reaches the spectator’s signed card. When the magician removes his fingers, four fingers, have burned through the cards “leaving the silhouette of your fingers literally perforated on the cards.” The ad copy is accurate in its description as it indicates that “Spontaneous combustion creates the illusion of burning through the deck with your fingers to find the previously selected card.”

The trick comes with a gimmicked Bicycle deck, a DVD originally recorded in Spanish with English sub-titles, and some written instructions in both English and Spanish. The DVD has an excellent trailer, which is the promotional video, which looks like the beginning to a Hollywood movie, but it is incredibly misleading as it portrays the magician’s hand burning through the cards. The misleading portion of the video is repeated twice and is accomplished by editing with a switch of cards. Although the spectator believes they have seen what the video shows, in reality, the spectator does not actually see what is displayed on the video. I do not think it was necessary to include the misleading portion of the trailer as the effect is very strong without it and it could have been almost as impressive if the routine was filmed as it is actually performed.

The video tutorial is five minutes in length an dis very easy to understand, as are the written instructions. The trick is very easy to perform. The video and the written instructions have typos throughout (mostly in the written instructions), but that should not slow you down. The DVD has two live demonstrations, one with the selected card being signed and one without. I do not think that it is necessary to have the selected card signed since all the cards are displayed to be different and I do not think any spectator would question if the revealed card is not their card.

There is some one time prep on the gimmick, which is easy to do and takes about 2 minutes with a sharpie. The only potential problem that I foresee relates to people with very small fingers. They may have some trouble handling the gimmick, but should be able to compensate by the way they hold and angle the deck.