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Anton James and The Magic Estate: Mentalist Symbol Pack Review

One deck of cards, 16 streaming videos, 75(ish) minutes, a whole bunch of print outs and a butt load of ideas and $30 bucks. Is it gem or is it rubble? Stay tuned to find out.

Effect/Method

What you're getting for $30 bucks is a deck of very well made — last a life time, well made — cards containing a bunch of different symbols. The pack can be used for design duplication effects, straight mind reading, predictions, and the standard gamut of mentalism effects. Built into the cards, you'll also find some standard "magic" effects as well, a color change, for example.

You're taught to use the pack through a series of streaming videos found on a password protected website. The videos can be streamed (not downloaded) via Vimeo or YouTube, whichever way you prefer to watch them.

The methods are nothing original. Again, it's the same old stuff in mentalism. What the deck brings to the table is a list of objects to add something "extra" to the presentations.

Ad Copy Integrity

The ad copy is 100% accurate regarding the quality of the cards and the general idea of what you're paying for.

Product Quality

The deck is very well made, and does handle like a regular deck of cards, but it's made of a plastic-ish material that will allow the cards to last much longer than a traditional deck of cards. The videos are pretty thorough, but there are some issues. First, in almost all of the videos, the lighting is not done correctly. Whenever a card is being shown to the camera, it's almost completely white-washed by the lights making it nearly impossible to see the card. Also, there were several cases where he messed up and had to re-shoot the take or start it over, but they left in all the multiple takes rather than editing them out.

A small annoyance that will not affect the final rating was the spelling issues. The word Elephant and the word Explanation were both spelled wrong on the videos. Minor, but annoying.

The video covers tons of effects and ideas that you can do with the cards. However, there were about 9 cards that were not discussed in the videos. I get that maybe they were included maybe as bonuses for us to think of our own ideas. However, the cards seemed to be printed with a specific purpose in mind. That specific purpose was never discussed on the videos

In addition to all the videos, you also get a huge resource of things you can print out to aid in the presentations.

Final Thoughts

All in all you're getting a lot of bang for your buck. The question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you would use a prop like this.

Final Verdict:
4 Stars with a Stone Status of Gem.