– Intro / Brief Overview
What’s up everybody and welcome to Magic For Beginners, My name is Keith and in today’s video we’re taking a look at a release that has been quietly making waves across the magic community and Blackpool Magic Convention this year and this is Sentinel by Adam Dadswell.
If you follow the channel, you know I love a good mentalism piece, especially one that takes a classic plot and strips away all the clutter. Adam Dadswell is a master of “clean” mentalism, and with Sentinel, he’s tackling the drawing duplication. Let’s see if this is the modern solution we’ve been waiting for.
– What Is The Routine/Trick?
So what is Sentinel? This is a modern and practical approach to drawing duplication, but ultimately can be used for so much more than that. Sometimes with this effect, you’ll have to do some suspicious switches, or place a piece of paper into a wallet for some reason just to get a peek of the drawing but with no story or narrative for why you’d do that, but this is designed to be as free and easy as possible to get a peek and have it disguised and actually part of the tools you’re using.
Essentially for the basic effect is that you have a stack of blank playing cards and you ask the spectator to draw a simple image or a word on the blank card. You even get them to sign the back to prove there’s no funny swaps or anything fishy going on.
You then place the drawing back into the stack of blank cards and with no funny moves or sleights needed, that card stays where it’s put. You then are able to take another blank card and draw the spectators drawing out and then you’re able to then look through the deck for their signed card and you can then turn over both cards at the same time showing the spectators drawing and you’re drawing too, which should hopefully be both the same thing, or very similar.
– How Much Does It Cost?
This is available for £50 from Adam’s Deceptive Secrets web site and I got an email the other day from Adam’s mailing list too which states that the response to this effect has been overwhelming and due to the magic convention and the spotlight from Alakazam, every bath that Adam had put out has been sold out completely. He has a small number of these left with him in person, so if you’re after this effect, you’d have to be quick to pick one up because after they’re gone, they’re gone and Adam won’t be making anymore of these.
https://www.deceptive-secrets.co.uk/store/p/sentinel
– Quick Performance
You may have seen this effect in my Blackpool Magic Convention video, or my top 5 tricks from the convention where Adam performed this on the wife and Adam started to actually use that as a performance slash trailer for the effect too which was great.
But here’s my performance of the same effect on the wife too, of course Adam can do it much better than me, but you know!
– What Do You Get With It?
Let’s get into what you get with this effect should you buy it. You get a nice big white box which has the Sentinel logo on the front, along with the trick name and Adam’s name. Inside of that box, you get the instructions link on the lid along with a nice padded inside which houses two things. On the left, you get a white card box with the Sentinel logo on there and inside of there is a set of black playing cards, or billets if you want to call them that.
On the right, you have a fantastic little card holder which has something added into the wallet to make both sides of them hard, to enable this not to be bent as the special gimmick is inside of this pouch which Adam states that it’s usually best to keep it inside here rather than the blank cards incase it gets bent.
For the tutorial, you’ll get a link which takes you to a web site where it has all of the tutorial parts that are hosted on YouTube on the page, so you can easily watch them. They’re divided into smaller section which makes it easier to watch, but some people may prefer it all in one video to make it easier, but for me it’s six and two three’s and makes it easier to pick up which bits you’ve left off at rather than trying to skip to a timestamp and find where you left off. It’s just under 54 minutes in total for the tutorial too and goes over the basics, different peeks and also goes into other opportunities for effects such as using it for a one ahead principle.
– Is It Easy To Perform and where can you perform it?
The question is though, is it easy to perform and where can you perform it? I’d say that it’s fairly easy to perform, ideally you need to have some experience with holding a deck and potentially being able to find a card from riffling down the side of a deck, similar to trick decks you get when starting in magic with long and short, stripper deck and Svengali deck. This is purely for getting a feel of the cards to actually perform the peek. There is some angle issues which you need to be aware of, so you couldn’t perform this surrounded 360, but face to face and with some crowd control larger groups, you could perform this with no issues, you just need to be aware of your environments and also aware of flashing.
– Can You Inspect It?
Can this be inspected? I’d say this is a yes and no. You can get the spectators to look through the deck and have no issues at all, so you could get them to do that, but once the gimmick has been added then the spectators can’t handle the deck, but you can freely show the deck front and back, spread in a fan and so many other ways as a convincer and if you were to take out the gimmick which looks just like a blank card, then the deck can be back to fully examined. This is where the effect was born, as this is what Adam wanted; have a blank deck and add in only one gimmick to perform the effect and then the gimmick could be removed and have it fully examinable.
– Is It Well Made?
Is it well made? I’d say that it is, yeah. Of course Adam states that you want to keep it not bent and as clean as possible so it doesn’t stand out in the blank deck so I can imagine if you leave it in the deck then the edges may match the rest of the deck, but as soon as you refresh your blank cards with some new ones, it may stand out due to this, but keeping it safe in the supplied wallet may reduce this down for issues.
– Positives
Let’s talk about the positives and I think this is quite an easy peek which hides itself very easily in a blank stack and I remember looking at the video I filmed after Blackpool trying to figure out how Adam got the peek as there’s no electronics involved and had a slight idea but it wasn’t until I got the effect and watched the tutorial that I saw how it’s done and thought “That’s actually smart” and then when watching the tutorial and trying it out for myself, the first time that you pull off the peek and see it for yourself, you think “Wow, that’s super easy but also effective”, which is always a bonus, as you can concentrate more on the performance or the routes you’re taking the effect itself whatever you’re performing, as the peek is just a small part of it all.
Another positive is that there’s no slights needed at all, if you can hold a deck of cards and do some card basics, then you should be able to perform this with no issues at all, I give you a pinky promise on that. The fact that there’s no electrics involved too makes it something you can rely on when performing and not worry about a battery running out while performing and missing that peek.
– Negatives
Let’s delve into negatives and for me one of the only things that I could comment on for a negative as such for me is that for me if you are very anal about ensuring your cards are perfectly stacked up in an even row when handling cards and placing them down, you may slightly see something sticking out the side of the deck, but if you’re more free form and free with handling, it’ll go un-noticed especially as even when using the gimmick, you can spread the cards, fan them, dribble them and so much more and you can’t see the gimmick, there was only the side of the deck when stacked neatly showed me something which may cause an issue, but that may be my magician mind and looking for things.
While this isn’t a massive negative or something which is an issue with the effect, it’s worth noting about this and I suppose you just don’t have to be conscious and just handle all the cards freely and no one will notice.
I attended a lecture with Adam at Darlington a while back and I just loved his overall vision to magic and performance of magic and again seeing this at Blackpool sealed up that fact more and I’m super interested to try and delve into more of Adam’s stuff too such as Everyday ESP and the Gradient System, as it’s always nice to add some EDC style mentalism to add to a repertoire to use as any point.
Hopefully you enjoyed the review and if this is something you fancy getting, then you’ll have to be quick to head over to Adam’s site and grab your copy before it’s sold out completely. If you want to see more of Adam’s stuff reviewed on the channel too, let me know in the comments and I’ll try and get my hands on some more stuff from Adam to show you all.
Again, I love this concept and when performing it on myself for the first time, seeing that peek and the way you do it was just exciting I thought and doing it a few times to other people, it’s really easy to get the hang of and I love the fact that you can use this in a large number of ways and not just drawing duplications, which makes this a very unique device to have on you when performing.
If you want to see more reviews on other magic products, then there should be some videos on the screen now, so click on one of those videos and check out more reviews, you may even find something you want to learn which you’ve never heard about before, but until next time, see ya!