What a nice breath of fresh air The Experiment by Joel Dickinson is. It isn’t a card trick or a re-interpretation of an old something or other. Okay, dice and matchboxes are among the common everyday objects used in magic, but not in lovely transpositions like this.
You show three cards, two are blank whilst the third had a double ended arrow on it. You also show a matchbox and remove from it a white die. The matchbox and die are placed on the table a few inches apart. You cover them with the two blank cards and hold the double ended arrow between them. You then knock down the cards and the box and die have switched places.
I think this looks really beautiful and very magical. It has a nice clean choreography with just a few seemingly innocent objects in play, everything appears fair and done openly.
What I also like, is that the transposition comes a surprise and quickly. All the dirty work as it were being done whilst you are supposedly just setting up the premise. You are done dusted and on the home straight before you have even hinted at what the effect is going to be.
It is the simplicity of the effect and the method which makes this a stand out item for me but I suppose it is also its downfall in a small way. Repeat viewing of the effect does enable backtracking to the method, mostly by magicians and they will overlook this and quite frankly - miss out. For real people in the real world, this makes them blink in surprise and do a double take in disbelief.
The teaching by Joel is very well explained and even though the method is simple and pretty much self-working he covers all the handling in detail.
To have everything examinable at the end does require a clean-up but nothing difficult. Personally I believe it is much better to start clean. I have everything examined, do the effect, pop the die back in the box and move on.
The Experiment is perfect for social media and practical for live performances, the only issue being angles. You can’t have anyone looking from behind.
The Experiment is a fun, quick piece of strong magic. In a perfect world it would be a few quid cheaper, but it is hard to complain.