– 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 reviewing Cube 52 by Craig Petty and released by Murphys Magic. I was a little privvy to this release before it was actually released, as I filmed the tutorial parts with Craig at Sleights Magic Bar in Bath, along with the trailer talking head and some b-roll and live performances, so I got to see it being used in person by Craig and the reactions that it got from people but of course this doesn’t take away from the review as the project wasn’t anything to do with me, other than me doing the filming aspect of it.
– What Is The Routine/Trick?
So what is the routine or trick? Cube 52 is a deck designed by Phill Smith who you may know from the DMC decks and also Craig’s recent releases of MindBlox and Evoke. The back design of the deck and box looks like some speedcuber cards that people who use Rubiks Cubes may use, but hide many secrets! The backs of the cards are marked so you know what the card is without even looking at it. The faces of the cards are solid blocks of colour and there’s 6 colours to match the 6 colours of the Rubiks Cube. There’s 54 coloured stickers on a Rubik’s cube and there’s 54 cards in this deck too, to match.
You get the deck in the snazzy box along with a MASSIVE amount of tutorials and when I say massive, I mean it! Theres 9 hours of instructions over 4 different volumes, so there’s lots of watching to be done. But due to the nature of the trick and deck, you don’t need to watch all of it, you can watch parts which you may want to learn and pick that up and you’re good to go. You don’t even need to know how to solve a Rubik’s cube to use this trick either, but since filming this project with Craig, I have been learning Rubiks to allow me to use it for some tricks.
– How Much Does It Cost?
Let’s talk about costings for this trick and how much this costs. I bought my Cube 52 and Evoke at Blackpool from Craig’s stall for a discounted deal, but all good magic retailers such as Murphy’s Magic, penguin, Magicbox, Alakazam, monster magic and Saturn magic for about £30 give or take.
– Quick Performance
There’s so many different uses of the deck using a cube and using them as a stand alone product so it’s hard to narrow down just one performance to show what you can do with it as it can be used with or without a Rubik’s Cube but here’s one performance anyway!
– What Do You Get With It?
When you buy Cube 52, what is it that you get with it? You do need to purchase or have your own Rubik’s cube to make full use of this, but for the price you pay you get the presentation box which is the same as Craig’s other Murphy’s Magic releases and inside of there, you get your deck of cards too. The box looks like a puzzle cube speed cube box and doesn’t mention Cube52 on there but has a few secrets such as a cube face reveal to use and a few other things.
– Is It Easy To Perform and where can you perform it?
When it comes to performing tricks from Cube 52 you can perform these anywhere and they’re easy to perform. Of course, some of them are harder to perform especially if it requires you to solve a cube and you don’t know how to do so, or require other sleights which you may not know like Elmsley Counts and the likes. But one of the things I love about Craig’s tutorials and I believe this was done via Pengiun stating that each magic trick release needs to have tutorials done as though the person watching doesn’t know any magic and has some teaching in there for sleights and things which are used such as specific shuffles etc. In the Cube 52 there’s a few of these extra tutorials about false shuffles and much more which is worth the price alone.
Despite this, there’s some tricks in the tutorial and using the deck that can be done with no sleights or cube skills which means it perfect for beginners right up to advanced and expert magicians, so there’s something for everyone. I love how there’s some mentalism tricks included in the tutorial too so it opens this trick up for all types of magic and performer too.
– Can You Inspect It?
For inspection you can easily hand out the deck and the spectator isn’t going to see anything out of the ordinary. The markings are well hidden so they wouldn’t be able to figure that out, but saying that once you know where they are, you can easily read them so don’t let that fool you at all. The same goes for the Rubik’s cube as all of the tricks use a regular non gimmicked cube, so the spectator can inspect the deck and cube after tricks. Some require specific setup so wouldn’t be able to be inspected prior to the trick but most of the time they won’t know what’s going to happen so won’t be looking.
Before we head into talking about if it’s well made, I’d just like a request to ask if you’re not already subscribed to the channel, then if you could subscribe then that would help the channel massively. Also, drop a comment below on what your favourite colour is from the Rubik’s Cube!
– Is It Well Made?
Is it well made? Yes the deck is very well made as it’s printed by USPCC and uses the best quality stock and finish so you can use these as you would your normal deck of cards which is always an added bonus and means these will be nice and durable too. The tutorials are great too, if I do say so myself and when you watch through, there’s even my bearded face which appears on screen to help with a trick too as a spectator, this is when you know you’d made it in the magic world, when you’re on a Craig Petty project, as he seems to be on pretty much everyone else’s projects. Fantastic marketing from him too, which he’s spoke about many times but now everyone knows who Craig.
– Positives
There’s so many tricks and things this deck could be used for so this is perfect for anyone at all to pick up and be able to perform something from it. The markings are great and nice and covert but still good enough to see and there’s also some nice stack options for those who like to use a stack for tricks or can be freely shuffled and used after that. The tutorials too, they’re huge and cover a massive amount of things with Craig, Kev G, Colin Claus and Peter Nardi and there’s definitely something for everyone in there to learn and go and perform.
If you’re a kid magician or perform magic often where children are there, sometimes they don’t understand or know about playing cards so having these solid blocks of colours on cards is perfect for them and you can use the cards to perform standard card tricks such as out of this world and much more. Just think of an ESP deck with colours instead of shapes and lines and you can use the same premise on Cube 52.
With having a behind the scenes look at Craig performing with this deck to spectators, I was blown away with how much this kills the audience. Craig has developed a routine which has about 5 or 6 tricks in order so you could perform one trick and be setup for the next one which was fantastic to see. The Omni cube routine was amazing each time as no one expects it!
As this is just a deck of coloured cards too, it’s incredibly easy to use them and create your own routines from this too as you’re not limited to what’s shown in the tutorials or only limited to doing those tricks with the cube. You can even spice it up like a colour match routine which is shown on the tutorials by taking it one step further and having that colour design printed onto a tshirt which you can then reveal and show it matches what the spectator coloured in.
– Negatives
While the tutorial is a positive, it’s also a negative for some people I’ve read too, but not for me personally. People have been complaining that there’s far too much video to watch for the trick, but as Craig has stated himself, you don’t need to watch all of the tutorial, you can watch the beginning which explains the deck and the markings and then you can select which tricks you watch and perform. There’s performances of the tricks that Craig performs followed by explanations, so you could always just watch the performance and if it’s something that suits your style then you could learn it, if not then you can skip forward.
One negative which isn’t a negative about the trick as such is that some tricks do require you to know how to solve a Rubik’s cube, so that’s something to learn but as stated you don’t need to solve a cube to do a lot of the tricks on the project. Cube 3 by Steven Brundage is a good starting point to learn some Rubik’s stuff and I’ve been using that to help improve my skills and I can now easily solve a side, which has unlocked the ability to perform other tricks from this project which I couldn’t previously. Next is to try and learn that elusive cube solve!
The positives definitely outweighs the negatives as the negatives are really that big of a negative I don’t think, it just means you have lots of reference material to watch to learn new tricks from the project and learn a new skill with doing a Rubik’s cube which can be used in your magic performances in the future instead of just card tricks.
I hope you enjoyed the review and I have another review on my channel of another release from Craig which is Mindblox which the link can be found in the description or on the screen and I’ll be shooting a review for Evoke soon too if you’re interested in that and until next time, see ya!