Magic Tricks

My review contains no disclosures of procedure beyond what is directly portrayed on the promotional video (i.e., the list of colours).

The gist of the method is fairly clear from the demo, and it’s clever and deserves exploration. There are a few obvious loose ends that prompted me to purchase it to find out how they are dealt with. Aside from some useful advice at the very end, deficiencies remain. A lot of assumptions are made, about where someone will stop, about colour they regard listed items to be, and the likely range of favorite colours chosen.

This is a potentially versatile product that is spoiled by inept tuition in terms of its content and its structure; it also has an inescapably shaky method, and it contains intructions for the participant that I regard as far too skimpy. It’s propless mentalism, of course. You are guessing, but with the odds are designed to be tipped significantly in your favour in most cases.

I have spent many, many hours over several days and over several weeks trying to make sense of Mello’s instructions. Mello understands his method, but he appears incapable of explaining it in a logical, lucid way to a normal person. The explanations are wrongly sequenced. He explains how to remember the list of objects without beforehand clearly providing the logic behind the list and its structure. The colour coding of his drawings is never explained properly. You are left to reverse-engineer.

There are two versions of Psystem.

Version A, the first list, is on the promotional video.

So far as I can tell, the outcome in the promo, blue, is the best possible case. (This is stated neither in the promotional materials nor in the instructions.) If blue is not chosen, the clear and firm instructions given to the participant need to change! This is close to a terminal fault. (This extremely important information is casually slipped at 6:35, long after the viewer is absolutely baffled. If I am mistaken, the fault is not mine.) No video is supplied for how to deal smoothly with any non-ideal case.

The two versions are claimed to have different pros and cons, but what these are is never specifically stated. I could not tell you what they are.

There are two lists (versions), and the connection between them is known only to Mello. Do we switch over, for some reason part-way through upon some trigger? Are they alternatives for variety? He offers no clue whatever. Next, out of the blue, he combines both lists in a ‘streamlined' version, for reasons he not explain, but evidently imagines that he has. Is it meant to squeeze in a wider range of colours? I’m just guessing.

It’s great if you hit (as the promo shows), so it may be worth a try, especially if presented merely as a warm-up or as a test of your psychic compatability with your participant. As propless mentalism goes, it shows promise, but the purchaser needs to reverse-engineer the method and re-populate his lists.

Some minor glitches in the first list are evident from the promo: e.g. I’d replace schoolbus. They are not yellow where I live. And what colour is an elephant? Grey? Are flamingos widely and instantly recognised as pink? Not everybody knows the colour of Elmo or Cookie Monster.

I hope that the Discussion area will clarify the method, the tuition, and the presentation. I also hope that the creator will add some clarifying materials to the downloads. Failing that, Penguin may need to get someone else to provide the missing instructions.

This product has been enthusiastically and credibly recommended in Unbiased Magic Reviews, which is why I eagerly bought it. However, my guess is that David of UMR has successfully deduced the method and tweaked the presentation. He probably has 20 IQ points more than I.