Refraktor Gimmickless Cube Project by Kev G and Collin Claus Review

Oops, that was a bit early, wasn't it? My finger slipped on it. Welcome to Real Badger Review. My name is Steve Faulkner. Welcome to a live review. Well, it's kind of a review. I'll talk about that in a minute. But before we carry on, like and subscribe. Check out cardmagiccourse.com. I was gonna, I've got a new thing to try here. Hang on, let me see if I can do it. That, there you go. There's cardmagiccourse.com, right. So there's all the courses you get on Card Magic Course are there. Hang on, I've moved it now. So within each of these, there's a whole course, which you get all for Card Magic Course, and you get the live sessions if you sign up for the Go membership, but you still get the recordings of the live sessions. We have Peter Wardell lecturing. I've got guest lecturers now, which is all tremendously exciting. So there's that. Yay, the screen share thing worked. That's exciting, isn't it? So do all that good stuff. And share this. If you know people that you think would like the review channel, please do share them. I get so little time. Because I'm working on reviews, not that I'm off doing other stuff, well, the odd gig, I suppose, but to publicise it properly. And I should be all over the forums and things like that, but actually I'm really struggling to be able to do that stuff. So any help would be lovely. But let me know if you're there. I haven't advertised that this is happening, this live stream, so I think majority of people will be watching it afterwards. That's fine, because I didn't even put it on Facebook or anything. So Magic Corner, how are you doing? Nice to see you, and thanks for coming. So any questions, if anybody does turn up, put them on here, and I shall answer them. But the reason I'm doing it like this is because I was gonna do a full recorded review of Refractor. And this is this gimmickless, easy for me to say, cube project from Kevin Klaus and Kev G. Which I've had for a while now. And it's one of those things, a bit like my course. It's a big thing, right? It's a big thing. And I sat down a few weeks ago and started learning some of the stuff on it. And realized, and remembered very quickly, that I cannot learn Rubik's Cube magic quickly. It takes me a long time to remember the algorithms, because my head doesn't work that way, and I'm old. But, needless to say, I still learn them, and that's the important thing. Some people get a bit hung up and go, I'm no good with algorithms, I can't learn them, the memory work. And of course, if you have issues with memory, medical issues, things like that, it's gonna be difficult. But even if you find it really hard, it does go in the end. And I do quite a lot of gimmick-less cube magic. And I'm very interested in this, because they've made this project. It's an online project, and it's a full course. They released it in volumes, and now you can buy all volumes for about, let me just see, for about 70, how much is it for all volumes? Volume one, two, and three bundle, 67 pound, 95. You get a lot for that, by the way. I'll talk about what you get in a minute. And then you get plus this AllSpark algorithm, this double-sided, two-sided solve, which is great. You can add that onto it, and get the whole package, et cetera. You get loads of different packages. Have a look at the link below afterwards. But it's a really interesting thing. So I am someone that, well, let's go back. So they made this for, the whole point of it, as the title suggests, is that it's gimmick-less cube magic, but it's also prop-less cube magic, meaning a lot of the stuff, like Takamizu Usui's work, and Stephen Brundage from there, that was building on that, and a lot of Henry Harris's stuff, with different solves that he puts with his gimmicked cube stuff on the downloads. A lot of them use props. They use bags. They use different things with them, and I love them. And Axel Heckler's EasyCube, of course, which is a gimmicked cube thing. And they use bags, and I do all of that. I love it. So it's not a replacement for that. It's kind of building on that, but the point of it is that you can take one cube out with you at a gig, or with friends, or whatever, and do whole routines just with this one cube. And you can do a whole show, pretty much, based on this stuff. A lot of the routines that I've watched build on each other. So you could go out and do 10 minutes with this cube. And actually, in my show recently, I did a gimmick-less routine, followed by a gimmicked routine. So you can obviously mix it with that stuff, too. And that's also what they've said, is that this is building on your existing work that you already do. So if you're like me, and you already do your 2-1-1-2, the Takamiz solve, or you do the gear solve from the Henry Harris thing, which I also do, you can build on top of this and start mixing all that in. And that's what I really like about this. You have got hours and hours and hours of stuff here with one cube, routines, mixes, solves, and full shuffles. But are they any good? Which is the important thing. And because part of all this stuff is that we are in its infancy, aren't we, with cube magic, relatively, compared to card magic and coin magic. So with card magic and coin magic, there's a lot of stuff coming out that has, since day one, has just been different ideas, but not necessarily improvements. And this does feel like it's really good quality stuff. These routines do look incredibly magical. Let me play you a little bit of this. I'm gonna put this forward to sort of a minute. Gimmicked and multiple cube routines out there. However, with Refractor, you can do multi-phase, meaningful routines with just one ordinary cube. And it does look this good, doesn't it? That's great. Whether you've only just learned to solve the cube, or if you consider yourself a speedcuber, this project will elevate your cube magic to the next level. Right, so I'll just show that bit. And that's a good point, actually. For levels, I think you can be a beginner cuber and be able to do this stuff. But you do need to be able to solve, I think. And a lot of people do put their cube magic out and kind of go, oh, you don't have to be able to solve. I think for pretty much all cube magic, even the gimmick stuff, it's really worth learning to solve. Because if you get in trouble, if you kind of get stuck, except for things like EasyCube, where you don't need anything, I think it will give you that confidence to be able to handle a cube. And on this project, they have a whole bit called Level Up, which is basically teaching you to solve, but actually teaching you the F2L and the more advanced algorithms. So if you want to learn to solve, you'll be able to do that on here as well. But there's loads of stuff online. But I will say as well, if someone that's really spent a lot of time delving into Rubik's Cube magic, there's a lot of stuff online already, but it's kind of scattered everywhere. And it's quite hard to find one decent bit of tutorial to get your head into. I Got What You're Teeth Into, that's what I was looking for. I learned from Mark Elsdon's Rubik's Remember DVD. And then I relearned from Stephen Brundage Cube 3, because I've kind of forgotten it. And then I went online and learned F2L, which I kind of struggled finding, like I said, all the scattered videos. This has it all in one place. So if you want to get into cube magic, I think if you haven't done any, this would be good for you. If you have done some, I think this would be good for you because it's different enough. I've started learning the first three things off of volume one, that's got released in volume. And like I said, none of it's that hard, but it takes me a long time to get them in my head. So the 4-4-6 mix is this brilliant algorithm that they teach you. And from that point, from a mix, you can get to any named side of the cube solved, which is a great thing. And I did, I talked a little bit of this with Diego Voltini's book. What's it called again? A Dark Side of the Cube. That was a totally different algorithm. But this is something that they've been playing a lot with. And I think Colin came out with it first and then Kev sort of played with it and enhanced it by accident basically and made it something really workable. So I've learned that. That's amazing. The cube card stack is based on Takamizu's stack and with permission, we've got that here. And something that is so versatile that you'll be able to learn for many different things. And it's called the cube card stack, of course, because Kev G brought out this cube card, which I also reviewed, which is great, but it's the same stack he's using now, but incredibly versatile. Incidentally, if you do your own stack, you can use that with a lot of this stuff, but I do recommend learning these stacks because going in and out of these routines is the power of a lot of them. It's kind of the economy of movement, which you wanna learn. And again, it's all very doable. The DT solve is what I really played with yesterday, which is this solve of either instant, you know, the really visual instant solves, as you saw in the trailer there, but also you can do it in a slow way, which is very magical. And the stealth solve, which is a similar thing, but done kind of behind the back. You show it behind the back and it's, what is that, the behind the back one? Oh no, it's the one where you instantly solve one side, but you do it in a misdirection way. You know that thing with three fly, where you can kind of do the appearance of a coin, but they don't actually see it appear, but then they look and it's already there. It's a color side of a cube solved. In that way, it's really magical. I think that's the thing with this stuff. Now, it doesn't just make you look like a cube wizard. It looks like you're doing magic with a Rubik's cube. It's not just, look how quickly I can solve, which some of the instant solves can look like. So there's three, look, I'll show you what we've got. We have, I'm gonna show you the inside of the course very briefly, and I hope you don't mind me doing this. So you've got here the, yes, yeah, yeah. So you've got the setup mixes. The interview is actually great to watch because it shows you the kind of thinking behind the thing. But you've got the mixes, cubes card stack, as I said, all spark, all these things. And then I've got everything. So I've got volume two, volume one, everything, the solves. And the quality of the video is really good. The teaching is incredible. It's just brilliant. So I'm gonna turn that so you don't see all the rest of it. And then the prices are here and this is the different volumes you can get. So have a look at rubikscubemagician.co.uk. Right, so I think that's pretty much all. Now, the reason I'm not gonna do an extensive one, which I have done, it's 16 minutes, but I'm gonna go into this a bit more because I'm gonna be interviewing Colin and Kev on here in a couple of weeks. And we're gonna talk about not just this, but them as well and what they're up to. But if you've got any questions about this, do put it below. I know this was a last minute thing. So if you are watching, thanks very much, but most of you are gonna be watching this afterwards. And I think that's about it. Just summarize. I've just talked about the things that I've learned. There are quadruple that amount of stuff. There is so much on here. And the really good thing is it goes into routines as well. Tells you the stacks, you learn it gradually, you learn the foundations of it, and then it gives you the routines. And I'm getting onto that part now where I can start thinking of a routine once I've learned all the different bits, like I've learned in this instance solve. And then the first routine, which is called the Decepticon, I think it's called, which is putting all that together in volume one and having this lovely gimmickless routine. And I'm really looking forward to getting into that. And at any level, I think if you're learning the cube, you should take a look at this. And also if you're advanced and you wanna do something different with the cube, remember you're carrying one cube around. The only thing I'd say about it is the, I was trying to think of negative to balance it out. The teaching's impeccable. It's amazing teaching. It's not an easy thing to teach the cube. But just when I'm looking through it, if you get the whole thing where you get all the volumes, they're a bit mixed up, the videos they've seen sometimes. So you basically, I've gone and worked out what's in volume one and worked out the order of things. But it gives you that on this opening page, basically that page anyway, and you can work it out. But really, it must've taken them a long time and they are proud. You can hear it in the interviews. They're so proud of it. And I think they should be. It's absolutely brilliant. So I'll be talking more about this. I'll be talking about it in an interview with them. And any questions you've got, do let me know. We'll be back. I'll be here tomorrow night with a comments on comments show. There's not gonna be any comments because I haven't done many videos this week, which is kind of why I'm doing this as well. But do come and join me at five o'clock UK time every Thursday when we'll just chat about stuff and ramble. So thanks very much. Check out carbmagiccourse.com. Get your free spread cull tutorial, carbmagiccourse.com forward slash cull, C-U-L-L. That's a extensive video on that perfect car move. Nothing's perfect, is it? But it's very good. And do like and subscribe. Thanks very much. Take care.