I’m In Love!

Throughout my career I mainly performed Mentalism or close up magic. One area that I seldomley dipped my toe in to was coin magic.  Sure I had my go to coin effects, Confusing Coins, Coins Across, some Coin Unique routines and a 3 Fly but coin magic did not interest me in the slightest. In all honesty I have no idea why, it’s just not something that really interested me, little did I know that would change in a big way!

So what made me change my opinion on coin magic?

Don’t get me wrong I loved watching good coin magic performed, I just never had an interest to learn it. Now let's go back, we were still in lockdown and I was having one of my regular telephone conversations with the legendary Craig Petty. At the time we had just released Gossip (the first effect Craig put out through Alakazam Magic). We were discussing future releases. This is never a problem when speaking to Craig as the man is machine when it comes to creating commercial magic. During this conversation Craig asked me a quest and that was what would you really like to release under the Alakazam banner? Now over the years we have released many effect but mostly card magic or Mentalism and one thing we really wanted to do was release a good, strong coin effect, so this was my answer. Craig response without even missing a beat was well lets do the Mirage Coin Set. I vaguely remembered the original release of The Mirage Coin set many years ago and I remember the buzz around it.

I instantly hit him with two questions

1. Who owns the rights to the effect?
2. What would be different with this new release?

The answers he gave brought a smile to my face. Craig owned the rights (so that was one possible issue sorted) and then he went on to tell me that when the set originally came out the quality was not good at all and he felt confident that we would not cut corners on quality and then came the real music to my ears. He said he had a bunch of new routines for the set as well as tons of improvements to the original routines that were provided.  We both agreed that this was a project we would work on. Now it was down to me to try and find someone who could manufacture the sets to the highest quality (believe me this is not an easy task) there really isn’t that many coin engineers around and out of the few there even less produce very high quality gaffs. More many years Alakazam had our own engineer who now has unfortunately retired (unfortunately for us, not for him as he’s enjoying his retirement)

I has samples order from a few coin manufacturers but the engineer who stood out to us was Roy Kueppers. The quality of the coins and workmanship were exceptional and so we took Roy on for our high-end coin projects.

The day of filming had arrived and the team headed to Houdini’s Magic Bar in Canterbury. Houdini’s is owned by my friend Sam Watson and if you are ever in Canterbury you really should visit!  We filmed all the routines in from of an audience of magicians and trust me jaws were hitting the floor! The magic Craig was performing with the coins was visual and extremely magical to watch. I felt my self getting more and more excited about this set. 

Later that evening the bar opened to the public and Craig took to the stage to perform the routines again but this time in from of a lay audience and let me tell you the reactions were incredible. This is the moment that H and I looked at each other and said we need to learn this stuff!

While editing the project I chose four effects that I wanted to learn and surprisingly that were super easy, so I had them down in no time. Like everything you do need to practice them to make them smooth and feel like second nature.  It was this coin set in particular that started my real journey in to coin magic. In fact there is also a bonus video available to all owners of the set where my teach my handlings and bonus routines to perform with this amazing set of coins.

If you were only to ever buy one coin set it should be The Mirage Coin set. There are so many great routines possible with this set and if you chose only 4-5 routines and mastered them you would have enough coin magic to make you look like a master coin magician!

As a magician I can honestly say the Reverse International Matrix is worth the price of the entire set!

If you are looking to further your coin magic, I would really suggest The Mirage Coin Set Extreme. Click the link to watch some of the routines and a full set using this amazing coin set.

Peter Nardi