Editor’s disclaimer: The main point isn’t the review, it’s the clever ideas Franklin had. Of note even if you aren’t interested in the product: How to make an object appear to fall out of a card, a bit of card-to-location theory, and an example of applying the Chinese Knockoff presentation.

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First, a quick review: Drew Perry’s freshman release with Alakazam is really a piece of work. If you’ve seen the trailer, you have an idea of exactly what you’re getting, but I promise you it’s a lot more well-thought-out than you might be imagining. So I’ll just spell it out for you in case you were considering it:

You get the (generic) Lego gimmick that you’ll use the same way as an Omni Deck or a Solid Deception gimmick. It’s made out of plates and can be disassembled as you like. You get a full custom Lego-themed deck which is worth the price by itself if you’re a collector. (They promise to sell refill decks if you want the deck only.) It contains 63 cards, and looking through it when I first opened it was the most excited I’ve been opening a deck since Piff The Magic Dragon’s deck. (I think Piff’s deck may be more exciting on the whole, what with getting to turn the box into a Tacular, but it feels like as much or more creativity has gone into the Bricked deck.) The back design looks exactly like the gimmick, including being a one-way design, a feature useful in a handful of ways.

On top of that, you get 3 hours of tutorials for routines to do with the deck from Drew (Editor’s note: Not our Drew.) and Craig Petty. There’s some great ideas in here for most of the gaffs and there’s a lot of classic routines in addition to ones constructed with these cards in mind, especially from Craig. There are plenty of things you can pick on the guy for, but when it comes to putting together worthwhile paid material, he will give you your money’s worth.

I got this both because I like to collect cool decks and because I like Lego magic as a general idea, particularly when it’s these generic Chinese knockoff blocks since they go so well with Wand O’ Blocks and the Chinese Knockoff presentation. I was honestly surprised at the amount of material they put together. (I was also surprised that some gaffs were included for which no material at all was provided, but more options are not something to complain about.)

If you think this is the kind of thing you would like then you will almost certainly be getting exactly what you are expecting with it. Review over. Let’s talk about some particular features and things that have come to mind while playing with these props.

A note before we continue: I only received the props at the beginning of the holiday season and haven’t had the occasion to use them in live performances yet, but we still wanted to get this out while it is relevant. I’m confident that the following ideas are workable, but this should all be considered more of an exercise in brainstorming than tested material. There may be future updates here as a result.

1. Lego to Deck

Most of the marketing for Bricked focuses on making turning the deck into Legos at the climax of a routine. But when it comes to the Chinese Knockoff presentation, I think it makes more sense to do it the other way. To use the Lego gimmick to introduce the deck so you can then go into card effects. For one, the gimmick fits inside the card box along with around 15 or 16 cards without jamming. The presentation is obvious: You bought something advertised as a Lego deck of cards on Temu, but you were expecting cards that look like Legos, and instead you got — and you pull out the gimmick. “But up until I wrote a positive review, I could have sworn that this was just a regular deck of cards. It’s like they put something on the box that somehow warped my perspective to ensure they got that review. Here, hold the box for a few moments.” Take four loose bricks (reclaimed from the center of the gimmick as described in the tutorial) and drop them into your hand alongside the box so they rattle against it and sound like they’ve fallen inside. Equivoque a value (queens) and have all the cards of that value inside the box when the participant opens it and pours them out. “Do those bricks look like actual cards to you now? I bet they even look like the value you were thinking of. The effect doesn’t work on me anymore, so to me it still looks like you’re holding a handful of bricks.”

Use the distraction of the appearance of the cards inside to swap the brick gimmick for the rest of the deck and set it far from you. Reveal the change, “How about the block? Does it look more like cards to you now?” and go into an appropriately thematic card routine.

Then, at the end of the routine, when the deck changes back into the gimmick in their hands, it becomes a callback, and a nice bit of closure for the story–the effect has worn off for them just as it did for you.

2. Runaway Joker

The tutorials explain the use of a couple of included gaffs to perform a routine in which a Joker character (which is a jester-style Lego minifig in this deck) leaves the face of its card and finds its way to the back of a selected card. Craig indicates his preferred handling is to close the routine with the Joker leaving the back of the selection and returning to its own card.

But my preferred ending would be to have the Joker fall off the back of the selection and take shape as an actual Lego minifig. You can see how easily this slots into the above presentation wherein the cards are just an illusion and there are only Legos—instead of saying the Joker will leave its card, you just display the Joker card but describe it as a Jester minifig. “But it probably looks like a card to you.”

Of course, the minifig in question is not included with the set, seeing as how (a) it contains no official Lego parts, and (b) Lego never sold a minifig that looks exactly like that, but lucky for us, I’ve tracked down the parts that served as reference for the Jokers. You will need this Jester’s torso, which you’ll have to paint to more closely match the card, this hat, this head, and either these legs, on which you’ll have to paint the left leg black, or these legs, on which you’ll have to paint the belt white. You can get two of those pieces together if you buy piece cas437.

I would suggest swapping the card with the Joker minifig on the back for the one without via double turnover, stealing the minifig from being palmed under the deck as you take the selected card off face-up and set the deck aside, then bending and snapping the card over the empty Joker card, dropping the minifig as you do.

2b. Early Jester Minifig

If you would rather the Jester becomes 3D at the moment it leaves the Joker, then flattens again when it goes into the deck to find the selection, the following should be workable.

While the ungaffed Joker is being inspected, tilt the empty Joker card on the deck and insert the minifig under it. (With the minifig lengthwise in right hand finger palm, spread the top quarter of the cards between the hands, letting the top card spread most of its width off of the card below it. Press the minifig up into this card as you square up and it will be inserted automatically, leaving the deck in a Marlo/Vernon tilt position and the minifig resting lengthwise against the tips of the third and little fingers.) Take the Joker back on top of the deck face-up. Do a Looy Simonoff Flippant move to both release the minifig and transform the card in one motion (covered briefly by the other hand). Put the empty Joker card on the table with the minifig for inspection.

Take the empty card back face-up on top of the deck and then take the deck at the near end between the right thumb and index finger, leaving the palm uncovered. Hook the remaining fingers to form a scoop. Hold the minifig in the open left hand. Do a Williamson Striking Vanish, but leave the top of the deck pressed flat against the palm and rub it down the fingers to really sell the idea of pressing the minifig flat into the deck before lifting the deck up to reveal the left hand empty as your right thumb twists the deck into the right hand palm to cover the minifig palmed there. Finally, turn the right hand palm up to reveal that the Joker card…is still empty.

Transfer the minifig back to the left hand under the deck as you spread through looking for the Joker-back gaff and be careful not to expose it as you cut the deck. In fact, it’s probably safer just to cut the upper packet to the table. Hold out the deck with the right hand for the audience to touch, proving the Jester is not a sticker, while the left hand secretly carries the minifig away to the pocket.

3. Card to Lego Gimmick

In the tutorial for Bricked, Drew (Editor’s note: Again, not our Drew.) describes how to remove some bricks from inside the gimmick to make room for a duplicate card for a card-to-gimmick reveal. He mentions that there is no good way to insert a card into it “live,” so a duplicate of a forced card is the only option. Here’s an alternative that lets you produce any freely selected card from the gimmick.

First, rebuild the second layer with the center section removed, like this:

(This will leave you with four 3×2 plates left over that you can use for the first effect described above.)

Add the ends of the bottom layer like this, leaving out just two plates. Note that the end with the four 3×2 plates is the same end that has the long 8×1 plate on the top layer, so that you always know the correct orientation to pick it up:

Next, cut an indifferent card in half width-wise, and fold it in half twice. Unfold it once and insert it into the void you created like this:

Use double-sided tape to hold down the half of this folded card that is adjacent to the 3×2 plates. Finally, cover it with the remaining two plates like this:

In performance, you will Mercury Fold the selection, adding an extra fold a la Tommy Wonder but letting this last fold come undone. When it comes time to reveal, you’ll palm the folded selection under the gimmick when you flip it over in your left hand to show the bottom with the 3×2 plates away from you. Remove the 2×8 plate first and set it aside, displaying the card there:

Remove the 4×8 plate and set it on the table studs up oriented sideways in front of you. Take the gimmick in your right hand, palm up and gripping the sides near the middle, and flip it over as if dumping out the card inside:

Either drop your left hand so that the palmed card falls back into it or let the palmed card fall onto the table as if it fell from the gimmick Han Ping Chien style.

While inviting an audience member to take the card and unfold it, your right hand continues to hold the card in the gimmick facing the table. With some help from the thumb make sure the card in the gimmick folds in half before you press the gimmick onto the 4×8 plate that is on the table. Make sure that it aligns just below the row of 3×2 plates. You can check that it is aligned correctly by looking at the side like so:

Once it’s pressed into place, casually draw attention back to the gimmick when you flip it over again to put the 2×8 plate into the remaining opening. Because the half-card inside has been folded in half again, the 4×8 plate completely covers it:

This display echoes the “window” you opened to first display the card inside the gimmick. The fact that nothing is visible inside that window now sells the idea that the card that the audience saw before is the same one they are holding now.

In the tutorial video, Drew (Editor’s note: Have I said yet that this isn’t our Drew?) mentions that he does not perform card to gimmick after performing “deck becomes Legos,” and I would agree this is a bad idea. Not just because it takes some of the punch out of the transformation by adding a weaker tag effect like finding the signed selection inside, but also because there’s no real effect there. You had the card and the gimmick in your hands, so it doesn’t really matter that no one saw you put the card inside—you must have put it in there. So if you think you’d like to perform this effect, do it as a separate effect. Produce the gimmick and hand it off to an audience member, pull out another deck and have a card selected and signed and returned. Establish the card is gone and then, while finger palming the folded card, set aside the deck and only then ask for the gimmick back, taking it into an obviously empty hand. Now you couldn’t have just put the card in the gimmick because an audience member was holding it at the time the card was selected and returned. That’s a proper card to impossible location. (Rereading Tommy Wonder’s Card to Ring Box in the Books of Wonder Vol. 1 will surely help here.)