Magic Tricks

Phill Smith is an extremely sharp mentalism creator and writer. Since I am familiar with his writings, when I saw him perform this, I knew immediately which clever technique of his made it work. And that technique is brilliant. Positives: The props look great, the patter backstory of what the thing is is terrific, it is nearly self-working, and it is indeed puzzling. Negatives: It does work every time, but it works exactly the same way every time. So if you perform it for a group of folks, they will undoubtedly be clamoring for you to repeat it. You can't. And finally, while this is a wonderful little trick, I think that it's more of a mentalist/magician stumper than a showstopper for laypeople. It's not something like bending a coin using The Xpert or doing PowerBall 60. For me, those things make laypeople go crazy; the effects look spooky-real. You need to really work on this to make it spooky-real, but even then it's more of an impromptu one-off or middle-of-the-close-up-act thing. Which isn't bad at all...