Magic Tricks

I really love IceBreaker -- it's a refreshing middle ground between card tricks and mentalism. It's also a nice way to transition between them in a show. The ability to tell truths from lies with no physical interaction is really stunning to spectators.

PROS
- The cards are high-quality with beautiful designs, and you get a ton of them. The price is cheaper than some products that basically send you a standard deck of playing cards.

- The truth-or-lie concept is made much more engaging by making it about the spectators (really participants) themselves, rather than asking people to lie about whether they're holding a coin or the like.

- The plot motivates the use of the cards, which come off as a store-bought party game and not a contrived magic prop.

- The method is at once insanely simple and completely undetectable. I gave the cards to a couple of professional mentalists for three hours, and they couldn't figure out the secret. But once you know it, it's impossible to forget or screw up. It applies knowledge you already have in a very, very clever way.

- There are no gimmicks, forces, shuffles, stacking, rough and smooth, smoke, mirrors, or other shenanigans. The spectators can handle the cards for as much and as long as they want, and make whatever choices they want. You don't ever have to see or touch the cards. You could literally hand the unopened box to a spectator and go call them from another room. The only reason you're encouraged to ask the spectator to pick the first truth that applies to them is so they don't take an hour to choose their favorite card. All that said, you can actually combine the IceBreaker method with other shenanigans to create even more powerful routines.

- You can apply the method to make your own cards with any truths and lies in almost any language. If you get some double blank cards (http://www.penguinmagic.com/p/810) and a Sharpie, you can create a themed effect for a particular group or gig.

- The creator hosts an active Facebook group for owners, which has lots of great ideas about how to expand and adapt the effect.

CONS
- I'm disappointed that the name of the magic product is printed on each card as part of the design. It would have been better to sell the product under one name and make up a different name for the spectators. It will be easy for spectators to find the product, and therefore the method. Still, very few actually will.

- For as nice as the cards are, they come in a plain white tuck box. If this is supposed to come off as a party game, it would have been nice to have a corresponding box.

- The English grammar and spelling is European, which creates a few oddities for American spectators. The truths and lies also leave off "I" at the beginning, so whereas an American would say "I am good at math," the cards say "Am good at maths." The line spacing of the lies is also a little confusing. None of this is a major problem, but it means your spectators might take a little longer to catch on to what you're asking them to do. You can always say you bought it in Europe.

All in all, IceBreaker is a really great effect that adds a whole new approach to the sometimes overdone magic and mentalism routines we're used to.