Monday Mail Call is a new feature on the site that really needs no introduction, but you know I'll give it one anyway. The idea is to highlight some of the deliveries I've received throughout the week, either at my front door or to my inbox. New books or decks I've ordered, tricks or videos I've downloaded, questions or suggestions from readers and/or friends, and the list goes on!
Will there be a mail call every Monday?! Probably not, but maybe. I think there's been a week without a delivery before, a long long time ago. Also, if any reader writes in and it's time sensitive (or I'm not lazy), I'd like to get it out there sooner rather than later too. So hopefully it's semi consistent.
Before I jump into things, now's a good time to let you know that if you have any questions about magic (or anything really), or suggestions or site feedback, just let me know here! Unless it's completely unrelated, there's a good chance I'll write about it too.
In this initial installment, we have three deliveries that came in (technically four, but I'm grouping two together... you'll see).
We start with the Keep Smiling Playing Cards. This is a deck series that was a campaign on Kickstarter. It was successfully funded back in January, 2020.
I didn't catch it back when it was on Kickstarter (though 320 other folks did and crushed it with 557% funding!), and in fact I had never heard of it until quite recently. I saw a post on Instagram from a buddy of mine almost a month ago now and it had only the back of the tuck on it. That back design alone is what sold me.
Looking up that one deck, I quickly found that it was a series of 5 -- whoah! Each deck, a different tuck and different color scheme. The faces of each deck are the same design, but each deck features a different colored backgrounds that matches the tuck's theme, not to mention the back design of each being different.
I caved and decided I needed all of them. There were several places to pick them up online but I really wanted to find a box set with the cool collector box. Unfortunately, I didn't find one that came with the box. There was one full set of 5 on eBay, but coming in at $100 I opted to buy themindividually which drove down the price considerably. If you're interested, pick up a deck of Keep Smiling V2 Playing Cards here on Vanishing Inc.
Next up we have two decks from King's Wild Project. Last year I had the basic STANDARDS subscription, but I didn't really understand it at first. I had signed up after seeing the announcement of the Sherlock Holmes deck and, well a little secret about me -- I really like Sherlock Holmes.
But yeah, long story short, I renewed my subscription for this year and ended up signing up for the No. 13 Club and Table Players. Oh boy!
Oh yeah, back to the delivery. I received the final deck from the STANDARDS subscription and only a few days later the first deck from the Table Players! Now I have a fancy Romeo & Juliet deck and a... uhm... a well I guess "Table Players" deck. Small letters on the side say it's Volume 13, so perhaps that's the name? Table Players Vol. 13? The Vol. 10 deck has the same "13" insignia on the front too, so dunno. I haven't opened it yet, but I will soon =]
And finally, No Man's Land. If ever there was an order I forgot I placed, it was this one.
The mailman came to the door yesterday with a box covered in Chinese writing, but he's used to it by now and frankly, so am I =P. This box's origin was pretty evident with the TCC tape covering it, but the first time I had a package like that I was really curious with what I ordered. This time, I was even more curious because I couldn't remember ordering anything from TCC in the past few weeks.
Well, I was kind of right.
About a month and a half ago I ordered No Man's Land Volumes 1 & 2 by Kiyoshi Satoh, from TCC. I'm typing this right now, staring at both books on my desk -- beautiful books, by the way. But having not opened them yet and forgetting I actually ordered them, I seriously have no idea what they're about. Okay, so I looked them up real quick (rather than opening them) and yes, they're card magic of course -- but specifically they're card magic by Satoh, who's hailed as Japan's King of underground magicians! Ah, I can see why I ordered them =]
Both come with a packet of gimmicked cards which match the book case colors, and that's pretty cool. I'm not typically an impulse-purchase person, and I seem to have placed my order in the morning, well after my first cup of coffee... I'm still racking my brain as to how I forgot I ordered these and now I'm going to go back through my inbox for order history to see what else I may have purchased that never arrived.
I don't have a review or even an opinion about these books yet given, well, I haven't read them yet. However, if you want to check them out for yourself, they're on sale right now over at TCC. I'm going to head over there after I write this too because there are 8 performance videos for the books and I'm excited to see what's up!
All-in-all, it's a pretty decent haul for the week if you ask me. Sometimes getting in multiple decks in a week is a lot because it doesn't give a good chance to get to know the decks individually, but at least I'll never get bored! And more books for the library -- gotta love it!
As a reminder, if you'd like to offer suggestions for books, tricks, decks or if you have questions about magic (performing, routines, sleights, etc.), just reach out here.
p.s. I spent way more time than I should have making the header image for this. I'm going to spend even more tweaking it until it's what I really want though... maybe one day it'll be a real image and not photoshop =P