Description

Art VanDerLay (Matt Townsend) Mentalism GB / Positive A New way of approaching the Max Maven Classic Ever since Max Maven released his effect Positive Negative on his second volume of Videomind DVDs way back in 1999, there has been a new and improved version of Positive Negative on the market almost every week. Look on any magic site with instant downloads and guaranteed you will find at least one “holy grail” solution to Max’s original effect. Some of these have had terrible solutions and some have had some interesting solutions but nothing that seemed to keep in spirit of Max’s original effect. A version that came very close to being a “winner” in my eyes was Kenton Knepper’s version that can be found in his Wonder Words series. This uses, like the original, equivoque and linguistic deception but in a way that the business card can always be handed out at the end. Still, I wasn’t 100% satisfied. I wanted a way in which the spectator never got it wrong. I never wanted to have to resort to a, “You got one answer wrong but look, I predicted that beforehand!” style “out” that the original and many others since then still adopted. I felt that the spectator should be able to say for 100% if their coin was heads or tails and my one and only prediction that could be always left with them should say exactly that. After many attempts to solve the solution, I finally had a brainwave using an already established method from a well-known effect. Combining the method from this well-known packet trick that still fries audiences today along with the Positive / Negative style presentation makes this a very clean and supercharged version of the original effect. Why is my version better than everyone else’s? Well for a start it isn’t. You cannot say that one method for accomplishing the same effect is better than Joe Bloggs’ method. What works for one performer does not always work for another. I will only say that I have found that this is my favourite way of performing Max Maven’s effect and the cleanest version I have seen so far. I hope you do too. So enough with all of the above, let’s get down to the nitty gritty of this effect!