– Intro / Brief Overview
What’s up everybody and welcome to Magic For Beginners, my name is Keith and in today’s video we’re going to be looking at the Bicycle Magician 2023 bundle from Bicycle Playing Cards. This is going to be a shorter video than usual, but further down the line, I will be creating videos discussing each of these decks in further detail and looking at them closer.
If you missed one of my latest videos, I talk about becoming a official UK ambassador for Bicycle Playing Cards and I was sent a bundle of decks and in the unboxing video I take out four decks of cards which have stickers on them saying Official Bicycle Magic Deck, little did I know that these are part of a bundle and sold together… Sort of.
The Bicycle bundle features a blue stripper deck, red stripper deck, red short deck and a blue double back deck. In my pack I ended up with a blue stripper deck, red double face and blue double back.
– How Much Are They?
So how much are these? For the bundle, it’s twenty three dollars on the Bicycle web site which is about £18, so it works out about £4.50 per deck. These days even a standard Bicycle stripper deck goes for about £8 in most magic shops, so even for the two stripper decks you’re left with the double backer and short cards at £1 a deck which is bonkers really when buying the bundle.
Short Cards
Let’s talk about the short cards. This is a deck of standard bicycle playing cards, but all of the cards in the short deck have been cut slightly shorter than the standard deck of cards. You may be thinking, why would you want shorter cards, but when it comes to adding in one normal sized card to this deck or one of these shorter cards to a normal deck, you can do all sorts of tricks with easily cutting to cards, using keycards and so much more and to a spectator, all of the cards seem normal, but only you know the secret.
Double Back Playing Cards
These may sound like a silly idea to some, but having a playing card than has the back design on both sides of the card is crucial to some amazing magic tricks. There’s not much else to say about these really other than if you want a stock of double backed cards you can do for tricks, then this is handy for that.
Stripper Deck
The stripper deck is something that most magicians will get when they’re getting into magic as it allows you to perform hard and seemingly impossible tricks with ease due to the nature of the gimmicked deck. When a spectator looks at a stripper deck, there’ll be nothing that jumps out to them, but to a magician it can be used to strip out cards from the deck without any sleight of hand or difficulty. This is sometimes called a tapered deck or a wizard deck too.
The most common form of stripper deck is created by having the long sides of the cards slightly tapered so than the sides no longer form a perfect rectangle. This tapering is only ever so slightly so that a casual handling or a slight visual inspection, it’ll show no imperfections but when you take a card out and rotate that card 180 degrees in the deck, you can easily detect that card and either strip it from the deck or easily cut to it. You can do this with multiple cards too, it doesn’t have to be a single card.
Want to produce four aces from the deck, you can do that. Want to get a single or multiple spectators to select a card from the deck and then easily produce all of the chosen cards at any notice, you can do that. Want to lose a card in the deck, cover it in a napkin, stab the deck with the knife and have the knife end up at the chosen card, you can do that too… And speaking of that trick, you can check out my easy stripper deck tricks video to see how you can do that, which should be linked in the description.
Also in the description is details of how you can become a channel member and help out the channel by paying a small amount each month and in return you get early access to all of the videos on this channel before anyone else sees them, you also get behind the scenes photos and videos and a whole bunch of exclusive things too as a thanks of supporting the channel. If that interests you, check out the description!
Now back to the stripper deck, I have a Bicycle stripper deck and it’s fantastic quality. I did start off in magic with one of those cheap marked stripper decks and they’re terrible to be honest. They’re good for a beginner to learn how a stripper deck works, but if you’re using the cards to perform, then the Bicycle stripper deck is what you need. You can use the deck for normal tricks and magic and when the need comes to use it as a stripper deck, you can do that too.
There’s even some neat tricks where you can take a card from a stripper deck and use it in a normal deck of cards as an instant key card, card cut and some other great options.
– Conclusions
The question then, is this worth it? That all depends on you and your magic. If you’re into stripper decks then you can get two of those for £16 and you can save £2 doing that. But if you wanted some stripper decks and wouldn’t mind getting some short cards and double backers for tricks then the extra £2 is definitely worth it to buy the bundle over getting the decks separately.
As stated earlier, if you wanted to learn how to find a chosen card with a napkin and a knife stabbed into the deck along with a number of other tricks using a stripper deck, then check out the video which would be on the screen now or in the description of the video and until next time, see ya!
