Phoenix Magic Trick Review

this is a new series where I review magic productss that I am not associated with this is not a sponsored video it's just a product that I bought I'm going to give you my honest opinion and the product we're reviewing today is called Phoenix which is available at Theory 11 the concept behind this trick is that you take a dollar bill and you have a spectator poke a hole right through the bill and this is not one of those tricks where you have like a fake pen and it's not really going through I mean this hole is actually going through the bill in fact you let the spectator touch the hole to feel that it's actually there and then with nothing but their hands the magician is able to heal that bill to the point that they hand it to The Spectator to keep as a souvenir here's what the performance looks like so check this out I have a pen and I have a dollar bill I'm going to just poke the pen right through the bill now you see it going through right is there any question there's a hole in that bill right now can can you see the hole yeah okay you want to feel it feel it just is there a hole there yes okay all right now what I'm going to do is with my finger I'm going to try to push the hole back down now I'm not going to take my hand out of the frame I'm just kind of melting the hole away now when you look closely no hole so this is the actual bill that I used in that video and I'll point out a couple of things I used a pen which I suggest you don't use because you'll see that the back of this bill actually has pen marks on it now because as I was going to make the hole in the B bottom I kind of Drew on the dollar bill that was not part of the trick and has nothing to do with the actual secret so I would suggest either using a pencil or some other sharp object but not a pen for that exact reason but as you can see this is the actual bill and other than those little lines from the pen there's like no hole there I mean you can look very closely and you will see this bill is healed so first let's talk about what I like about this trick it actually feels and looks like real magic you'll almost fool yourself while you're doing it and I love that it ends so cleanly that you can comfortably give the bill out as a souvenir and when the trick ends you are completely clean there's nothing in your hands or something you have to hide or a ditch or anything like that some of the things you need to know about this trick though this is not for a beginner if you're just getting into magic and you're not comfortable with crowd management or working with props and gimmicks I would not suggest this trick for you although it looks incredible it's not as simple to do as the video may make it look there's a little bit of a handling and and a bit of a move that has to happen in order for this to look fully clean if you are a magician who's used to performing live you should definitely check this out one of the things that immediately grabbed me when I saw the video for this product and I knew I had to buy it was that it was so clean I mean they showed the bill you could see the hole going through so it wasn't like some trick pan or something it was actually a hole in the bill and then after it was healed he literally handed it out to the The Spectator to keep so I knew that the bill itself had to be fully healed or else he would never chance that and I even saw this performed live for David Copperfield and he seemed impressed by it and those things together told me this was a winner so when I received my package and I opened it up my initial response was disappointment when I saw the method I thought that could never actually work but then I watched the video and they explained a lot of things that I didn't initially get when I first looked at the gimmick and after practice iing it a couple times I was able to perform it live and it actually works just as well as the video says it does now this is probably obvious but I'll say it anyway this is not real magic so if you're kind of new to Magic and you think you're going to borrow someone's Bill and then put a hole in it and then heal that hole and give them the bill right back and it literally works like that of course that's not how this works there is a gimmick to it it is a magic trick but it's one that looks so clean and you end so clean that I think it's definitely worth investing in and something you might want to add to your act there is a little bit of prep work before you do this trick so you can't just borrow someone else El's Bill and do this trick although there are ways you can do a bill swap or something but I would say 99% of the people who are going to do this trick are not going to do a swap you're going to provide the bill yourself and it doesn't really matter that it's your bill or their bill because they're literally putting a hole in the bill and you you're going to hand them the pencil or whatever sharp object you're going to use and you're going to jam the hole they're going to see the hole in the bill so no one's going to question whether it's a real bill or not because obviously they just put a hole in it the impressive part is that you're able to heal it without any funny moves right in front of them there's no switches at that point there there's no fast movements it's nice and slow it's right in front of their eyes and then magically the bill is healed the hole is gone and you give the bill out as a souvenir overall my rating for this trick is four out of five stars and the only reason I'm not giving it a full five stars is because it's not as simple as some other tricks where just anyone can take this and start performing it immediately you have to be a real performer and you have to be not afraid to use some gimmicks in order to make this work and look as good as it can but if you're a professional magician this is a five out of five