This is the fifth effect in the Aztec Series and my personal favorite so far.  In fact this is one of my all time favorites of all the beautiful items Thomas has created.  Firstly the outer box looks amazing - with very intricate patterns throughout.  Thomas never spares any expense on creating the right atmosphere for his magic.  This is reminiscent of one of Thomas' classic effects: the Witch Boxes.  However, the boxes are much higher quality and I think the main routine is more interesting and the mechanism itself is easier to work.

You show what looks like an intricately carved black box and take off the lid to find three smaller slides and a gold coin. You show how the coin fits in each of the smaller slides by dropping it in and dropping it back out - there is clearly nothing else in them.  You then do a 3 coin Monte type effect which gets too confusing so you go down to 2 slides.  Each time no matter how closely they watch they cannot find the gold coin.

For the finale you show that instead of a single gold coin, each box now contains a coin of a different color: green, red and purple.  And the gold coin has found its way back into the original box.

What I love about this apparatus is how smoothly you can switch between: gold, colored or empty coins because at any time any of the three can happen. This means the apparatus itself lends itself to other routines.  But the one supplied by Thomas seems to work pretty smoothly.

This is a real gem and please hurry to your favorite Thomas Pohle dealer to get one, they won't last long!