Evoke by Craig Petty Review

hi my name is Steve Fon welcome to real magic review and this is evoke by Craig [Music] Petty before we do this review please kindly look at online magic.co that's my membership site been going 10 years I have been hammering the videos recently not edited yet but I have the uh Royal Roads card magic course which is along with many many other courses you get for your membership on coin magic rope magic spongeball magic loads of different card courses live sessions how to practice and oh what did I do recently another one can't remember uh but the royalroad course is now 200 pages of the book I've put into a video course over the last couple of years and uh it's nearly finished kind of so I'm very proud of it so have a look at that online magic.co it's there is no better way to learn there might be I just thought i' to say that cuz it sounds good and please like And subscribe check out the podcast Steve Fulton's magic show I haven't put a podcast out for a couple of weeks because I've been on a deadline a couple of deadlines and panicking and things have been occurring but I have a couple in the bag to uh to be edited and go live soon so have a look at that and please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so evoke I am recording this as live uh Craig's just done his live stream it's now been released I have not watched it because I've been coaching so and I didn't want to but what I am aware of is that this is out there in the open Craig has talked about what it does all the different ideas so I'm not going to go over all that which is a shame because I was going to over the weekend I have watched nine hours nine hours of Craig Petty lovely Craig Petty for nine hours uh and to be honest by the end of it I thought I would hate great bety but I don't we will go into that in a minute what I'm going to do is just break down and give you a rough idea of my genuine thoughts on this there is a lot of hype around this Craig showed it to me sat with me for about 10 minutes showed me the trailer talk me through it at the session convention I'll talk about my initial thoughts and how they kind of changed a bit and as close to genuine as I can be without having performed it now I have not I wanted to get footage but there's just no point so many people have been asking me they want to see the review so I'm just going to give you my thoughts I I can see what can be done I don't have to get footage of me performing um but I may try to in the future or I might not so what it is very briefly because we've gone through this this is a deck of cards that are many motivational posters and they've got all these lovely quotes on them some by celebrities some by not celebrities different emotions as you go through black and white photos that are the black and white are negative emotions the color are positive emotions there are 13 of each of those there are two Gaff cards one of these 100 monkey H hundredth monkey hund monkey principal um where you can't read it and so you show someone it and then you say we're I'm going to take away your ability to read show them it again and they cannot read the card and then it becomes clear again there is also a gaff card that is based on an L NLP type idea of shrinking your emotions down and there is a small anxiety card as well so you show them the anxiety card and put it down at its most basic level think about your anxiety think about it going away turn it over and it's shrunken down and it's not prescriptive meaning yes there are loads of routines and I've got pages and pages and pages of notes but as you know Pete Turner said and pretty much everybody on this said that you know this is something that you can use for many many things and when people say that you know it's a utility device it usually means you can do one really good thing with it but we've got hours of footage of other stuff you can do with it because we just wanted to make a massive download to give this sort of idea of perceived value so when Craig said to me with his chirpy little face there are nine hours of there's nine hours of tutorials I was like oh my the worst thing I want to hear because with a big release I do want to want to watch it all and watch it all I did people were away from my house at the weekend I could have been on VR playing video games but I was watching you Craig Petty with Peter nardy inan Roland and of course uh Pete Turner so I went in and when Craig showed me this I said him was great and I I did think it was great I genuinely thought it was great it would have been really awkward had I not but part of me was sort of going well okay it's it's a deck of marked cards the markings on the back say all manner of things and we've seen this with Luke J's Marksman deck you know it shows you the card that's next in the stack the cards that's beforehand in the stack other information on there as it does here so you can use this in a stack or not in a stack very very simple stack it's like a super easiest M deck in the world it's alphabetical so it's very very easy to remember but you don't have to remember it because you can read what's on it and what's coming next and whether it's a positive or negative emotion and information on the photo that's on it all sorts of stuff great part of me was still thinking all right but you know it's just a deck of cards really and it's a and kind of dressed up slightly differently but then Craig started talking to me about it and I kind okay I can really really see the power of this now I'm someone that has You Know spoken to people about emotions a lot not necessarily in a woo woo way but you know they're very important to us they run our organizations and our world really and our you know our decisions so there's a lot you can do with it but what I don't like doing is you know pretending I'm doing something mysterious and then dressing up as a magic trick and I thought is it a bit of that and then when Craig said things like ah there's an out of this world and there's a these you know you can do normal card tricks with it I just thought yeah but then you've sort of changed it to an out of the way you've kind of taken away from what it is and just turned it into a card trick but of course I was wrong not of course well maybe of course I'm wrong quite a lot I'll break it down the videos you get nine videos the first of which I'm trying to remember it I want to do this now cuz it's fresh so I'm not going to cut in loads of stuff you don't need it the first video is Craig talking you through everything that this does so so there's the marking system the Kuran principle which I really like actually there's all these different pictures but there is only actually five pictures and they're cyclical there tree Mountain ocean waterfall flower that's it in it uh and there Cal if in the stack which is great if not you can still read what's on it so you can do loads of stuff with the image you know straight away whether it's black or white whether it's positive or negative so think about red and black cards all of a sudden instead of red and black cards you've got black and white negative and color positive so great and then you've got these two hours of Pete Turner now I I really like Pete Turner he's just got some banging good stuff and he has really geeked out on mentalism for many years so he does a routine where he's just just improvising he's just kind of improvising he sees what he've got he improvises around it and I love that I love his out of this world you will be able to do it straight away it's very very easy but there's subtleties in it that make it great I did perform that to my friend this morning I'd seen it like the morning two mornings before that on Saturday and I couldn't remember off it but it but it still went really well and I could check everything cuz I could see the markings you can Elevate that into something more powerful when you start talking about emotions and I don't mean you know you got to be careful with this stuff that you don't you don't sound like a kind of someone that knows loads of about em it doesn't you are talking about people's emotions so it's you know you've got to tread lightly and and all the stuff here does really it sounds very heavy when Pete's talking about it but it's all quite light you're not going to take anybody down to a dark place and and you know and I don't think that's a healthy thing really just because you talk about negative emotions you're not necessarily taking them to a very dangerous dark depressing place so when it says depression on here or depressing or depressed sorry you know that's not licensed to get someone you know to relive some triggering memories but we can we can use it powerfully in in different ways and after watching two hours of Pete and Craig I was I felt energized by it I felt I felt the potential this is all about potential and as Pete said it's you know it is something that he some routines but don't feel trapped with them it's a way and this is one of the main points I think great about this it's a it's a way to practice all those mentalism but not just mentalism which we'll come to in a minute cuz I don't think you should just see this as as that but all those things that are quite scary if we get misses or it doesn't work out you can practice your Cod reading you know very simple Cod reading skills because you've got this thing to F back on and I know that's a lot in the case of mentalism you know the you know you've peaked it you know it whatever so you cold read towards it but there are different Avenues you can go with this so if you get a miss you can do something else you can treat that as just a conversation before you do the reveal and I think that the routines in here really lend themselves to that it's great training ground for for your mentalism or to to just enhance your your performance and the simpler the better if you ask me so great things where you just do very simple someone takes a card out and you work around that different color separations on the whole project when we get to Peter nardy next he took a different way of looking at it well slightly different way of looking at it and I think it was really good to get someone like Pete turn who's really full on mentalism someone like pet Nardi who's a bit more of an allrounder well a lot more of an allrounder you know he knows his stuff he knows his card tricks and then someone like Ian Roland who came on last minute when Craig said you know can you can you give me a testimonial and he was like actually no I want to come and talk about this and some ideas I've had which is great because he in doesn't really do that sort of thing very often so Pete nardis as soon as he kind of went right you can do a poker deal I was like why would you do a poker deal with this well you do a poker deal with it because of course it's not a poker deal at all they're not playing cards so it's just dealing out cards and there's you know if you look at something like uh liar poker and you know many very very simple tricks using Crosscut forces and things like that they they are so much better than they are with playing cards and I'm not saying they're bad with playing cards but you know for someone who's as I said at the beginning got a whole course on the ro road I think it's with this go to that stuff right go to the Royal Road go to the tricks that are very nice and good with playing cards and go actually how can I make this not into oh these are your this is your card but this is your emotion the emotions you're thinking of how to group The Emotions together and I think there's some re I mean there are some strong tricks in Royal Road but this again elevates them into something different I love Pete stuff I'm not going to go through all that they talked about but you you'll have heard it from Craig and I from the end of that again i' I've done like four hours now in total and I was still going yeah I'm still thinking this is good it's a very very rare thing and then Craig's got a couple of videos he's got a video on what how do you use the stack and he takes loads and loads of classic tricks then how do you use it either when someone shuffled it or you've shuffled it so you do stack work and then you Shuffle it yourself and you go into loads of routines that are again going back to classic routines Dr Daily's last trick Triumph got to be a bit careful these haven't got borders so the Biddle trick again same reason but um any card at any number I nearly skim that I why would you want to do an any card at any number but he uses age you know you think of an emotion you experienced doesn't have to be that heavy but something you experienced in the past think about what age you were and you count down in this really lovely way which is very very easy you know pretty much self-working I don't think anything self working but you know there's nothing really to do much there and it's really convincing you know for car people you go oh why would you hold the cars like that but actually would totally work so it lands on the person's emotion at their age and that's the reveal he's even got a card across and pretty much any classic card plot you can think of is in there in well Peter ter petal and and Craigs bit then the with Ian Roland was great and Ian said you know really he kept saying at the beginning you know I've just thought of some fun things it's about fun and it's easy to think of when we think of cold reading and all that kind of stuff as not being fun of being serious and it made me think this should be a fun thing yes it can be moving and it can be all that stuff but there are some fun stuff to be done with this as well and that takes me to this idea of you know when you see emotions we think it's all got to be mentalism and it's all got to be like heavy and that's fine but I think you could not do any of that and just say I'm going to use emotions instead of cards and then you could do things like the rubber duub vanish we take depression we make it go away and it turns into something else and you're not trying to pretend you're not doing a c trick you're very openly doing a c trick but you've got a whole different way of presenting it because you've got the pictures because you've got the black and white the color the emotions that it just sounds like something else even though it isn't so yes if you're doing the mentalism stuff I would avoid doing things like you know visual tricks where something changes for another thing but actually if you're open about that and you're not trying to be that person you're just using a different script then it opens up a whole different presentation it's a bit like you know I think of John Allen when he says do an ambitious card but you know don't write a a name write a random word and then all of a sudden your presentation can be improvised around that word and with this you you know they take a card you look at what it is you do an ambitious card routine and all of a sudden you can talk about that word rather than going oh it just comes to the top not that I think there's anything wrong with that cuz I love all that stuff I don't think it has to mean anything but if you're someone that loves meaning in your magic someone like Ian Roland who's really important to him that his magic has meaning then this gives it to you and it gives you the tools to improvise around that and I think this is the first you know first blush when Craig showed it to me it was here's a thing bit different than C trick it's going to be nice was a a little bit kind of oh all the hype around this and then we you know as with most things simple in concept but complex in what you can do with it and I think it's great after 9 hours I wasn't like right put that in a box never going to look at that again I think there there's something really fun or really profound in what you do with these and I wouldn't disregard any of it watch it all but don't watch it all At Once by hour five I was a bit like but then I kind of took a break went back to it with with fresh eyes I've got loads of notes on this there's loads more to say about this but you know as you know loads has been said and I could go on for a long long time it's not perfect and neither should it be that's fine the I would say near perfect is the marking Phil Smith has designed this and the marks are stunning you you're reading whole words here and you you can't spot them unless you really go for it and you know with presentation nobody's going to have the chance really but very a lot of information very cleverly H hidden importantly you know these are usbcc and you might think oh actually that might take away from it but they don't look like it you know they they've got the feeli they're the size so if you want to use a double backer um a double blank card like Craig does in one of his routines you can get that um no double backers maybe a double backer would have been nice cuz there's certain things you can do there like Pete's got this Pete Turner's got this ESP matching routine which is so good you know based on a lot of ESP matching routines which I love but there's actually a Larry Becka version of that treat with a double backer which I really really like um so maybe it would have been nice something like that but I'm nitpicking you don't need it I think you've got enough but what was going to say um yeah so the marking is great the Design's great they look brilliant they look real importantly the Box looks real not that one but that one looks real that's got a crib on it as well if you need it and you've got this this the kurran principle the markings all that you've got a motheral book test so there are book test words so each of these has a quote and they read the quote you say think of a um one of the big interesting words on there and you can get the words and of course you can then link that word to the emotion you know if you think on your feet uh you can improvise around that as well so that's great too the celebrity thing it's it's fine it's good it for me out of all of it it's just thing I probably wouldn't use as much of it ties in with Craig's trick gossip which I reviewed I liked gossip I think it's a nice thing but I'm not sure for me you know he's got the baby gag he does with it and he uses the gossip cards and that's great without the magazine it is good stuff I'm not putting it down I'm just saying for me it's probably not the one I would use you've got five celebrities that have written these quotes real ones and you can fish for who they are so they look at it and you can you can kind of get the person they thinking of then you can do baby gags and stuff like that uh you know was fine but not something I'd probably do there is something in me that you know you've got all these these names that people wouldn't have heard of that sound legitimate and then you've got you know a a lovely quote and then it says Matt Damon and Parton me thought I know Matt Damon's a very int intelligent person but I kind of think of it like that doesn't sound like Matt Damon this isn't of course what people are going to think but for me I kind of thought it would been nice having five names that you could guess that weren't celebrities I quite like the idea of that and and the ti I get it you Ty it in with gossip and and that's nice um he's got this I think it's called the stupid principle is how you fish for the words and the way they you can find them but for me I I could take that or leave it there's so much in it without that but some of you may look at that and go actually no I can use that for this great thing or it can be a really light-hearted thing okay who wrote that okay Johnny Depp and then you can do a presentation around that but those celebrities to me are you know kind of Fade Into the background when you've got the power of the other stuff of this there's a lovely Ace assembly which isn't an nice assembly clearly but you're assembling the the emotions and you're putting a positive emotion a negative emotion in the positive emotions and that vanishes when you when you spread the card so so that I thought was really lovely um Peter Nardi has this great thing where it's a very simple sort of pokker deal thing like I said but you're putting the pictures together so they're dealing out it's not really a poker deal they're dealing the cards and what they're doing is dealing without knowing it all the pictures together so all the mountains are together and all the SE is together and I you know it means you can they can take any one of the piles look at one and you know what they're looking at and it's those again Royal Road tricks that are kind of mathematical in principle but just would be complete magician fallers and if it lies Pokey yeah I mean so clever that you know they've shuffled the deck twice and you still know who car who chose what card without any kind of you know peaking or anything like that and by the way there is loads of good ways to Peak that Peak goes into the subtleties if they're looking at that one you know what one they're looking at but you do it in a way that is professional isn't just like have a look at that um if you wear glasses like I do these are fine as well it just jumps out at you after a while and I just think it's a really really solid product I have changed my mind in the way I thought it was good and now I think it's really good when something is hyped like this of course it creates such a huge level of expectation that there will be people that go oh see that but look into it look at the potential of it and start you know thinking of your own stuff to do with it and if you just want to do card tricks where the cards vanish or you do an ambitious card trick there's a lot to be said in that as well maybe it would have been nice to have a little border on there you know not so it looks like a deck of cars but would would give you a little bit more leeway if you do start wanting to do like Triumph and like that and again if you think about the presentation of Triumph it does make sense it's not just a c trick so slop shuffles make complete sense you know Pete's got Pete T's got a lovely thing if he does a slot Shuffle as a separation as well so each one of these videos give you loads of information not just on this deck but on some really good stuff that will enhance your mentalism and your magic so it's a you know for whatever is $40 the the deck itself is great but you get hours of stuff that will if you're beginner just give you so much to do that isn't going to take loads of slight of hand and will give you a grounding in mentalism and Magic which I think is lacking in a in a lot of releases I love a 20-minute download don't get me wrong but if it's going to be long I want it to be full of good stuff and I know this is becoming a bit of a trend especially with Craig is to make hours of stuff but with this I think it's there's no real fluff the A's a couple of tricks I thought okay you know won't do that because it that you know they'll go crazy at the end and I think well I don't want them to I want them to be I want this to be an intimate experience great for parlor and all that but I think this for me would be sitting around with some people with some Focus maybe on stage but really focused to just do a reading type thing but with something that feels a bit different great product there you go anything else I can do to slag it off so people don't think I'm being too POS all the time I don't think so um other than it isn't going to make you a better person but it might make you a better magician uh yeah right think Steve anything else I loads of course there's loads to say and I've forgotten but uh there's evoke from Craig Petty well done you well done it's a nice product and I didn't waste nine hours of my life so thanks for that take care oh have a look at online magic.co will you thanks and the podcast and all that like And subscribe bye [Music] a