For the longest time, the Rubik’s Cube did not exist. Literally the entire history of the universe until 1974. Then for a considerably shorter period of time, there were no Rubik’s cube magic tricks.
Finally in 2008 Fooler Doolers released the Enchanted Cube, and shortly after in 2013 Takamiz Usui released The Cube, and between them created the entire genre now called Rubik’s cube magic.
This was the beginning of the end.
Since then there have been variants (and blatant ripoffs) of The Cube, and there have been other special cubes that can essentially solve themselves. Outside of this there have been a lot of tertiary tricks, such as putting a Rubik’s cube into a jar with a neck too small to accommodate it, or turning a miniature cube into a handful of colourful sweets¹.
There have been multiple decks of cards with rubiks cube patterns on that spectators can freely pick and have the cube shuffled to match.
There have even been modifications of other tricks like the sucker die box to make the big six sided die look like a Rubik’s cube.
The most recent trick in this genre at the time of writing has been Cube52, a deck of 54 cards² with faces that are just flat colours. 6 colours, 9 of each, just like the stickers on a Rubik’s cube. That’s the mathematical coincidence underpinning the entire project, which as a lover of coincidences I very much approve of.
The headline effect is you shuffle the deck, deal a grid of cards and it matches the faces on a mixed Rubik’s cube.
So why does it need a 4 volume 9 hour instructional video? I. Had a little correspondence with Andy of The Jerx about this³. I suggested that Craig Petty and Alakazam were paranoid about someone else releasing a similar product with a routine they hadn’t thought of and stealing the market, so they published everything they could think of to head off derivations. Andy said they were rushing to market and didn’t bother to try out all the routines to whittle it down to the best ones for a tight product. They actually released more through laziness.
Having seen examples of the poor editing⁴ and watched some of Craig Petty’s videos of the other effects on the release, I’m almost certain that Andy is correct. The instructions include routines for doing oil and water, out of this world, and triumph style effects, the only difference being that they use a deck of colourful cards rather than regular playing cards.
So in a way it’s kind of like the entire Cube magic genre in microcosm.
See there are essentially 2 effects with a Rubik’s cube.
- Cube is solved
- Cubes match
Everything else is just window dressing.
But in much the same way that carrying round a whole special deck of cards just to do one effect feels a little over the top, a lot of Rubik’s cube magic requires the performer to memorize the sequence of moves to actually solve the cube for real. This takes a long time to get down to 100% fluency without errors and as such is a hell of an investment for the average magician who just wants to do a magic trick. So when you put in the effort to learn it, you sort of want to make as much out of your use of Rubik’s cubes as possible. This is why there are so many attempts to expand the range of what can be done with a cube, mostly involving taking an effect done with another object and modifying it to work with Rubik’s cubes. This ranges from the sensible to the utterly absurd⁵.
This is just my own opinion, but it feels like people are publishing effects with Rubik’s cubes not because the effects are any good but because Rubik’s cubes, beyond all explicable reason, are cool again. Rather than take the cynical stance, I’m going to suggest that the people focusing on this absurd area of development could be applying their skills to forwarding the art of magic in bold new directions, but instead they’re chasing a trend for a quick buck.
This is why when people tell you that capitalism is the best system for ensuring that people use resources in the most efficient way for the good of all civilization, you can laugh in their stupid faces.
¹ Candies for the Americans in the audience. I wouldn’t normally clarify this sort of thing but I know some people call desserts sweets and sadly no one has made a trick where a Rubik’s cube turns into a handful of jelly and ice cream.
² Yes I know, why call it Cube52 if there are 54 cards? Well everyone “knows” there are 52 cards in a deck even though there are actually 54 when you include jokers. Don’t think about it too hard.
³ Correspondence might be over egging the actual events, which can be boiled down to He questioned it on his blog, I emailed suggesting my explanation, he then emailed back to correct me with a much more sensible explanation.
⁴ Scenes where someone makes a mistake says, “Lets go back to the start,” and begins again, the kind of thing you see in blooper reels of movies or get left on the cutting room floor, are present in the main video. They never went back to edit them out.
⁵ Okay, you want to examples. Henry Harrius’ Cube in Bottle is pretty cool and the method can probably be combined with Kieron Johnson’s Isolated to put a signed cube in the bottle if you routine it right, so that’s pretty good. On the other side of the spectrum there’s a terrible bitten and restored Rubik’s cube which I would love to share a link to but it sadly has been taken down by its creator. There’s a light and heavy Rubik’s cube effect, theres a Rubik’s cube hot rod and wildest of all, I don’t know if you heard, but some dingus printed a whole deck of blank cards in 6 different colours…