Draven Reviews: In A Flash by Felix Bodden

Do you have some extra holiday cash burning a Ho Ho Hole in your wallet? Want to know what you possibly missed out on this season? Well I'm back with a special holiday edition of my Draven's Reviews to discuss whether this new batch of tricks are holiday hits, or just steaming piles of yule tide turds destined for the land of misfit magic. So grab your eggnog, sit back, relax, and let me tell you about what's hot and maybe what's not this holiday season.

Title: In A Flash
Artist: Felix Bodden
Producers: SansMind
Link: Available At Your Favorite Murphy’s Magic Dealer
Demo Video Link:
Retail Price: $24.99 USD DIY / $34.99 With Gimmick
Learning Difficulty: Easy
Length of DVD: 30 Minutes (Approx.)

In A Flash is a hyper visual card transposition on steroids. What you get is a DVD, and some super secret special gimmick making stuff. Some assembly will be required.

If you have been a fan of my reviews, and have been reading them for some time, you know I hate having to build gimmicks. I usually call these DIY tricks “Art Projects” and for good reason. Fold this, cut here, glue that, tape there. Some of these constructions can get intense. In A Flash is one of those “a lot of set up for a little work” kind of tricks. The gimmick for In A Flash requires careful consideration to how cards line up with each other. The wrong measurements, can throw off the entire gimmick causing you the pain of having to start all over again. They say on the DVD box that the gimmick construction time is around 20 minutes. I think it took me closer to 30 minutes. My end product just doesn’t look or feel like it would fool anyone. It’s too thick to pass as a single card, and as a rule I just hate using the secret stuff in general. This looks killer on video though! Of course, you can get away with things on camera that you can’t in person. I should also note that SansMind also reserves all TV rights.

Performing with the gimmick is easy. The gimmick does the work for you. There’s a little magic maneuvering you must do to finish the transposition, but that’s not hard to master. Honestly performing the trick isn’t as hard as building it! It certainly is more fun than building it. There are no angles to be worried about, and the reset on this is near instant. So good walk around effect. The visuals are strong up close, but they get muted if seen at a distance. This is certainly only a closeup style effect. The gimmick, or at least the one I built, is thick. I don’t like it. I don’t feel it looks and feels enough like a regular card to pass for one. This maybe magicians guilt, but I think there’s too much going on here to be fooling.

At the end of the day this is another trick that looked good on video, but in person leaves me wondering. I’m not satisfied with the product I came out with in the end. I’m not going to blame the magic though. Not yet at least. I’m going to assume that my clumsy craft skills are to blame. For now this gimmick sits inside the DVD box, along side the DVD. I’ve put it into my library, and maybe at some point in the future I’ll revisit it. Maybe try and rebuild it. But for now that’s too much work, and I have time better spent on other things. I’m sure someone out there is going to love this trick. I’m just not sure that someone is going to be me.

Editors Note: Upon completing this review, and prior to posting it, I discovered that this trick exists with the gimmick already made for you. It costs ten dollars more, but for those of us, like myself, who lack any skill at construction it is probably money well spent. Hind sight being what it is, I wish I had known about this prior to choosing the DIY version.




When I give my product scores below I am measuring them on a scale of 1 to 10. 1 Being absolute the worst score possible, and 10 being the absolute best, making a score of five average. The three points that I grade upon is Product Quality, Teaching Quality, and Overall Quality.

Product Quality: 5
Standard pricing, visual magic. Not so sure on the gimmick. Not happy with the DIY result.

Teaching Quality: 8
Tutorial is easy to learn from.

Overall Quality: 5
Not sure about this trick. It looks amazing in the demo video, but I’m not happy with how my gimmick turned out. I’ll give it an average score of 5 and assume my displeasure is my fault for not building it right.


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