First up this is a great piece of mechanical engineering..but why you ask do I give it 2 stars instead of 5. Well first up it fails in my opinion the critical objective..that is it looks fake. It is like performing card magic with gimick cards..that look like gimick cards. We all know you cannot let anyone check this out..so we are aware it is gimicked in some way..so I am not giving anything away. While this initally looks like a piece of beautiful wooden magic..on closer inspection this looks if it was made in India or China...even the instructions seem to give the inpression they were printed there as well.The one problem I have is ..for a red deck gimicked box..it does not look like a true bicycle deck..it looks like a copied one...certain things about the deck are missing that would give the impression that it was indeed a real bicycle deck...as I said card magic with gimick cards that look like gimick cards.No thank you.

That said it is really is a great piece of mechanical engineering..but if a little bit more time had been taken with the finish, a better bicycle deck insert used that was a true bicycle deck cover and presented and protected in a better box cover ..rather than a cheap brown piece of cardboard box..not only would I pay more, but I would have a nice piece of magic apparatus to display and use.

While I will keep this item..I wont use it..the original concept from occupied Japan in the 1950 with these type of
boxes are in my opinion much better made. 10/10 for engineering but 2/10 for quality and finish. Sorry guys buy if you want to add to a collection of boxes like this only. For me display purpose only.

This is just a beautiful little gem. The wood is of good quality and nicely stained.

The box itself is nicely stained and feels and looks quite solid. The unit appears to have made well and to tight tolerances.

The decorative gold crown on top
does in fact serve a useful purpose, with a little diamond/club/heart and spade within the crown.

The workings & mech of this little gem are so stealthy that at first I was a tad confused even after reading the one page instructions. The instructions do include 6 photos explaining the method, and they have enough info that anyone will be up and running in minutes.

I thought the directions were a little muddled in that it didn't make it crystal clear that the box is capable of THREE separate modes. THREE. Once you understand that, then I had that "aha" moment and it all fell together in my brain.

The workings are really quite clever. There is no way that the box could be handled or examined - but the 3 possible phases are as clean as on the video demo. The drawer slides smoothly for all 3 phases. The drawer when empty doesn't look at all fishy - it looks plain empty.

The 2nd phase has the red deck appearance but I could see situations where one might just skip to phase 3 where my blue ID appears.

Also, be careful NOT to insert your real deck into the box in its first phase position - did that by accident when I started playing with this - you probably should avoid doing this as its a tight fit in and out.

All in all I really like this. It feels almost like a higher end Tenyo Elite product without a doubt. It will be interesting to see the durability over time, but clearly this is a superb card box for the money. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

Overall: 9/10