Spreadwave 2.0

I've just ordered my 4th and 5th of these! I LOVE this trick! A bit of a learning curve, but equal or even superior in effect and impact to the invisible deck, AND you can be sure your audience has never seen it before (unless they watch Penn & Teller's Fool Us.) I'm stocking up for fear this eventually become "unavailable." I hope to be using this ingenious deck for the rest of my life!

I'm an amateur hobbyist, not a professional nor a highly skilled magician. That said, this deck is quite easily my favorite gimmicked deck of the ones I've tried. There's no difficult sleight of hand, just memory work to know which moves correspond to which card name. There are many ingenious little details that make the learning curve much smoother, and even setting up and resetting the deck are much easier than I expected. The fact that Mathieu Bich could design a card trick devious enough to fool Penn & Teller yet easy enough that even I can do it is a testament to his creativity; I have no experience with any of his other creations, but they could all be garbage and I'd still think he's one of the smartest people ever.

For some reason, my deck doesn't like to spread as cleanly as it does in the demo videos and on the DVD. In the most basic performance, you spread the blank cards across the table and the three grey ones with writing appear in the spread for you to pull out; however, for me, they don't consistently spread enough for all three cards' grey areas to show up. As an amateur, I'd be too eager to question my ability to spread cards rather than blame the deck, except I read a review of the same deck on another site that similarly observed that the cardstock seemed somewhat inferior to Bicycle stock. As a result, I ended up teaching myself one of the more advanced handlings so the cards don't have to be spread on the table until time to reveal the chosen card's name printed across them. Again, since the cards don't seem to spread as well for me as advertised, fully revealing the printing takes a fair amount of manual adjustment, but I don't think this hurts the impact of seeing a blank deck of cards magically turn into the printed name of a selected card.

For hobbyists who just want to entertain friends, the chance to not only appreciate Bich's genius but to also perform this incredible trick just might be worth the $50 price point. Professionals would probably be deterred less by the price, but they might want to be aware of the disclaimer on the DVD case: "Spreadwave's broadcast rights, including internet, television, video, or any other medium known or to be invented, shall be reserved by Mathieu Bich. Only written consent from Mathieu Bich authorizes permission for broadcast." None of the other tricks I've owned have featured such a disclaimer (not that it affects me, because I don't yet have the hubris nor the wide variety of tricks up my sleeve to attempt to entertain such audiences!), so I thought I should bring it up. In spite of the caveats I've brought up thus far, though, I think this is a very worthwhile item for card magicians with even a modicum of experience (and not necessarily a modicum of skill in sleight of hand) to look into owning. :)