Vanishing Point by William Tyrrell

If you read this blog often, then you should know that I genuinely don’t like to knock products. I prefer to review products and books that I enjoy. If I have a product that I know I would never perform, I prefer to give the cold hard facts so that the buyer can make an informed decision about whether it works for them or not.

Well unfortunately, I don’t have much good to say about this one, so I’m going to keep it short so that it doesn’t just become an attack on the product or the creator. 

Vanishing just releases this effect. It allows you to transform 5 decks of cards into 1 deck of cards. 

Let’s do the classic pros and cons. 

Pros:

• The gimmick works

• The gimmick should last a very long time

• The gimmick is customizable. It comes as red, but it includes stickers to make it blue, and it includes stickers to make the decks look like they are multiple colors. It will take more work if you want to use a specific brand of cards other than what is provided. 

• There’s no thread, elastic, or latex which means there’s nothing to break. 

• The gimmick can be copped off so that the deck can be examined.

• The package is great. 

• The video tutorial is great even if it’s only 20 minutes long. It covers how to customize the gimmick, multiple ways you can use it, and some additional ideas.

• It also comes with a beautiful PDF that highlights some other points.

Cons:

• The gimmick has a huge diagonal crease and tape running across the front of the 5 boxes. It is a hard crease that is virtually impossible to hide. The pdf suggests that the multiple color boxes helps hide that, and it very well may, but right out of the box, I was a little disappointed with the visibility.

• The gimmick is 8 cards thick at the front meaning that when the 5 boxes become 1, it is very hard to ignore the fact that one side of the box appears to be much thicker than the others.

• While the gimmick can be ditched, there is a gimmicked card either in the cellophane or in the box which should be removed before everything is truly examinable. There are ways around this, but they change the handling or set up. 

• Since there is no thread, elastic, or latex, the change from 5 to 1 boxes isn’t fast enough. Supposedly with practice, it can become “lightning fast,” but because of the nature of the gimmick, I don’t think it will be as fast as people hope/expect it to be.

• The biggest con is that there is no way into this. You must start the trick by apparently holding 5 decks of cards stacked in your hand. The only way you could get into the position is to dip beneath the table or into a case before bringing them out. And even then, it’s an odd sight that most of your hand covers, so I don’t even know if an audience would know what they were looking at without explicitly stating what it is.

• There is only one method taught that allows the audience to see 5 decks of cards from multiple angles, but it can only be done on social media as it requires dropping 4 decks out of frame.

That’s about all I have to say about it. The biggest issue I have is practicality because there just isn’t a great way into it. They suggest using it as an opener and walking up to the group with the gimmick ready to go, but I can’t think of a scenario in my work where I would want to approach a group with my hand full of multiple decks of cards. So that’s my biggest concern. Well that and the crease.