Reviews: Read What Kenneth Johansson Is Saying

Spirited Pasteboards

reviewed by Kenneth Johansson
Rating: ★★★★★ (Date Added: Tuesday 11 August, 2026)

This is an *excellent* book. The material and principles you find in here are relatively unknown, as far as I have seen, and the effects you can accomplish with the principles Leo explores are jaw-dropping.

For the mentalists who believe that playing cards have no place in mentalism, this book will prove you wrong. It contains, among many other things, two of the most powerful impromptu effects I have ever seen, and as someone who has as many books on magic and mentalism as I do, that's saying a lot. But I'll let the effects speak for themselves:

"White Noise": A spectator shuffles their *own* deck, as many times as they wish. They deal several cards face down onto a table. They look at one, showing no one else, and place it back. They gather the cards up and mix the cards to lose their card in the deck. They deal out all 52 cards face down onto the table. The performer never touches the cards. This is not hyperbole; this is not a matter of touching the cards so discreetly that no one notices or remembers. It is an actual incontrovertible fact. Someone could record the entire thing on video and see nothing, as there is nothing to see.

Despite this, you know exactly which card the spectator selected. Another variation, "Multi-Card Locator", is essentially the same effect, but with *multiple* spectators each selecting their cards. You find them all.

For the hip performers, note that both of these effects will work with common TCG cards such as Pokemon and Magic the Gathering.

Even if you perform nothing else, I'd argue these two effects alone are worth well more than the price. Certainly, there are lots of effects released nowadays which cost more and are far weaker than either of the two I mentioned above.

As an additional note, for those who use marked and/or marked+stacked decks, this book provides a method of determining your place in the stack or the deck that is far more visible from a distance than almost all reader decks that I've seen, yet there are absolutely no marks to be found. Considering that some of the most lauded reader decks such as the "Ultimate Marked Deck" will set you back $40, that increases the value of the book even more.