so im asking you guys, what is some good visual hard hitting coin magic?
i was actually looking at lethal tender or some jumbo coin stuff. what are your thoughts on those 2 and again what is some good hard hitting visual coin magic that you would recomend?
I would say this depends on what I would call the time / money trade off. To explain what I mean, let's look at both extremes.
If you have tons of time, but little spare money then using non-gaffed coins are the least expensive way to go. Skill takes time to acquire and when learning from books it often happens that you lean things differently than what the author intended. This can sometimes be a
VERY good thing as you will have unknowing created something new that is unique to you. An example of this (even though it is a card trick rather than a coin trick) is Apollo Robbin's "Changing TeBe". He learned the "TeBe Change" from Ross Bertram's book "Bertram on Sleight of Hand" however he didn't read closely enough and ended up learning it "wrong". To make it right he did tons of mirror work and had to change a few other things (angle palm rather than tenkai palm, a different orientation of the cards, etc.) to make the change effective. Later on he found out that he had made a small error and the end result was invention. I can't tell you how many variations of Chris Kenner's Sybil cut I've seen. I blame this on the fact that at a very critical point in learning that cut, you have to turn the page in the book. (...like a trained seal, using your nose! ...since your hand are full of blocks of cards in somewhat awkward positions...) Chris did you do that on purpose?
If you have tons of money, but little spare time then gaffed coins are the way to go. You can pickup something like Lethal Tender (which I use to perform in restaurants back in the day) and get a
VERY strong reaction which doesn't require a lot of technical skill. Scotch and soda also can be performed many different ways (though the reset isn't quite restaurant friendly if you are table hopping) and there are lots of things you can do with a hopping half set. There are tons of other gaffed coins that I'm sure the guys at the magic shop would be happy to sell you.
Most of us fall somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. We have some money and some time. Often people pickup some coin gaffs first for the quick payoff of being able to put a coin routine or two into our act. DVDs make it easier to "see" what the effect is suppose to look like; however they usually way fewer effects on them (often with less advise on variations) than what you would find in a book. Since you are copying what you see, there is less chance for a fortuitous error to creep in, so people often end up doing it correctly, but not uniquely.
I hope my words help,
-ThisOneGoesTo11
