Magic Tricks

This may be the best $10 bucks I've ever spent - well, actually only $9.30 from Penguin Magic.

Degree of Difficulty

Easy to intermediate. Several of these tricks are almost self-working but quite a few require false counts and displays which are taught on the DVD.

Teaching

Very good. You'll need to know the Elmsley Count; a false count that appears to show four cards while hiding the face or back of one card. Colombini does teach the Elmsley count at the beginning of the DVD. Aldo does an adequate job teaching the Elmsley and you'll manage to learn it - however there are better places to learn the Elmsley Count. He starts out teaching the Elmsley with a 5 card packet counting into his right hand - probably not the most standard Elmsley you'll ever see. I'm guessing most intermediate card slingers already have a version of the Elmsley that they are comfortable with.

Aldo also teaches the Hamman Count, the Jordan Count and his Laughing Count (which is a cool alternative to the Hamman Count).

The teaching of the tricks are superb. He credits the creator of each routine.

Count 'em, 10 tricks! That's a buck a piece for some really strong magic.

The quality of these effects are really strong. Because many of the packet tricks are not gimmicked, you'll add at least a couple of these gems into you working repertoire.

Production Quality

It's a fairly low-budget affair as you might expect from a $10 DVD but the video quality is crisp and clear. The menu structure is very simple. For some reason, I can't skip ahead to the next track (trick). You have to go back to the menu to advance to the next trick. The audio quality is fine except that the goofy musical track that plays during the menu is three times as loud as the narration which is annoying when you have to go back to the menu to advance.

This DVD scores very high on value. At $10, you'll find some really good material to infuse into your walk around sets. The only down side is that you'll need to invest in some blanks and blank-backed cards in order to perform all of the effects on this DVD. I'm sure to order more from the Colombini $10 store in the future. Bravo Aldo!