What's the Worst Thing About: Invisible Miracle

I would say, on average, at least once a week someone writes me and asks me to hype their product on the site. Do you even read the site? I think. When have I ever acted as a hype man for other people’s shit?

I’ve spent thousands of hours working on this site. You think I did all that just to torch my credibility by flooding it with posts praising your new egg bag, Joshua Jay?

(And honestly, Josh… you’ve been writing me, asking me to “praise your egg bag” for years, and it still hasn’t come out. 🤔 It kind of seems like something else is going on here. Especially when you're saying things like, “Tell everyone how soft and supple my egg bag is. How you can fit it in your mouth. How it begs to be crushed under your heel.”)

Yes, I occasionally write about other people’s stuff here (and I do it monthly in the newsletter) but those come organically from things I’m actually using.

Five years ago, I made an offer: I’ll advertise your product here, as long as you send it to me and let me tell everyone the worst aspects of your release. This has proven to be… not super popular. We’re currently averaging about one taker per year. And one of those was a guy selling his trick for a dollar.

Today, I’m going to tell you the worst thing about Invisible Miracle by Germán Dabat.

What is it?

(Ad copy)

You show a red deck of cards and leave it in plain sight. You hand the spectator a blue deck, and they can cut it as many times as they like. They choose either the top or bottom card and hide it in any pocket they want. Then, they hide another card in a different pocket and reverse one card in the deck.

Now, you reveal that you've predicted everything! Inside the red deck, there's one reversed card with a message written on its back. It reads: "Right pocket: 10 of Hearts, Left pocket: 4 of Spades." Finally, you turn over the reversed card and it matches the spectator's reversed card perfectly!

The Good

This is a very strong triple-prediction. It will almost certainly fool non-magicians.

And the price is right at $10.

The Bad

You have to put this together yourself. It’s not too difficult. Just a minor annoyance.

You need two decks dedicated to this trick. This is not something you would carry around with you casually. I mean… you could, I guess. I wouldn’t. Carrying around one deck is weird. Carrying around two decks makes you look like a sociopath.

The deck with the prediction in it can’t be examined. I don’t think there’s a ton of heat on that deck, but it’s still not ideal.

There isn’t much of a build to the effect. Essentially the same thing happens three times.

What’s the Worst Thing About Invisible Miracle?

This is one of the most card-centric tricks I’ve ever seen.

They make a selection from one deck of cards, there’s a reveal in another deck of cards, and the prediction is… written on a playing card!

It’s almost impossible to make this trick about anything other than playing cards. Which means, over time, it’s likely to blur into the background of every other card trick you’ve shown people.

Final Thought

I’ve listed a lot more negative than positive aspects to this trick—but that’s the purpose of these series of posts. When weighing the positives and negatives, I think this is easily worth the $10 investment.

I’ve come up with a few presentation tweaks that address some of the issues above and elevate the trick a few notches in my book. I’ll be sharing those in the next issue of the Love Letters newsletter.