Product description: I really like Sebastien, he is a friend and he has some excellent release: Offset, Manivelle which is one of the coolest rising card I’ve seen. However, Captured is not as good as those releases, I don’t see the point of this trick, neither the cleverness of the gimmick. It could have been made differently to produce a more interesting effect but this is pointless in my opinion. The main idea here is to have a card selected, signed and returned in the deck. You show a different card with a “sticker” (?) of a folded card and you “take” it out of it.. There is no logic in this effect. Anyway, let’s go into the review.
Price and where to buy it: This is sold at $34.95 and you can find it in nearly every Murphy's magic partner !
What you get: You get a ziplock bag, not the best packaging I’ve seen, with inside a printed piece of paper and the gimmick. You can access the explanation on Murphys, they’re done in music so no problem of understanding. The explanations are well shot and you should learn the trick easily. The gimmick is made so you can show a sticker of a folded card on it and pull it out but I don’t see the point of this. Why do you have a sticker on it? Why on a card? So many questions, this is not logical and not useful. Overall, you won’t be using this at. But let’s go into the rest of the review.
The pros and the cons: Here is the core of my review, let's begin with the cons, as I will usually be doing, I prefer to keep the good things for the end.
THE CONS:
The gimmick is not new, this is nearly the same as RAW from Sebastien and Jordan Victoria. He added something to make it “automatic” but it’s not new.
I don’t get the point of this effect, why on earth would you have a sticker of a card on a card? Why would you take it out? This is a complete nonsense.
The gimmicked card is a bit visible in daylight.
THE PROS:
The routine is visual, even if it doesn’t make sense, the pulling out of the card is really good.
Gimmick is ingenious, but as I said, this could be used to do much more than the Captured effect.
The gimmick comes already made so there is no art&craft to do, which is a nice thing. You also get more stuff in case your gimmick breaks.
Overall rating: Wow, this was a hard review to write, I don’t like this product and there is nothing to say about it really, it’s pointless in my opinion and the effect doesn’t make sense, 1/4 hearts.
As for the difficulty level, you have to do a mercury card fold in order to be 100% clean, so I’d say 2/5 stars.
Similar products: RAW by Jordan Victoria and Sebastien Calbry works on a similar principle but the effect is way better in my opinion.