This review might contain mild spoilers
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Tricks Dedicated to Witches (TDtW) is a decent manga that was unfortunately cut short for some reason - some say the author himself requested because he was running out of ideas, others say he was not selling enough - but what I can tell you is that TDtW is a surprisingly decent manga that has some complex societal ideas hidden under the "shounen" layer.
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#Story
I think the series is well-written. The idea of getting transported 400 years ago into Medieval Europe to see the church being the big bad lynching women as "witches" and their inhumane treatment is something that this manga does good at. The magic tricks are thoroughly researched and explained in detail, this manga while feels "shounen logic" is far from it and does a really good job of making it as grounded in reality as possible, well apart from the whole transportation thing of course. What it also does is portray the renaissance period accurately, the problems with lynching that the church propagated and how they inhumanely killed women and looked down on them for simply being women is something that I found was well researched.
But that's just the history aspect of it, what is also well written is the plot itself. This kid is sent back 400 years to rescue witches and regain his "love for magic" and what he did best while simultaneously saving women from getting murdered for no reason. But what it does have a problem with is definitely the regular shounen tropes like the character being very young in age, or the comedy that doesn't quite land, and of course the fanservice ecchi moments. But that's just nitpicks, I think the story is good and deserves credit.
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#Art
The art is above average but nothing too amazing, it does what it needs to do and does it a decent enough job to not detract from the experience.
The backgrounds are neat, and the characters are drawn aesthetically pleasing and unique that you won't run into same-face syndrome anytime in this series. Of course, there are panels that are pure sakuga like the one above but even those aren't anything that you would download and save to use as wallpapers. But what I will give credit for are the panels that show the magic, just like the writing.
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#Characters
The manga was supposed to have 1 male character alongwith 5 female witches but since the manga was never written to completion, we never meet 1 of them and have to settle with 4. Nevertheless, this is perhaps the most "shounen" as this series gets, there are moments where you get the "Fuck yeah let's fucking gooooooo" hype for certain characters but other than that, the motivations are just very limited to "good guy does good guy things". This is where the series really gets very average and becomes stale for me since it does nothing new with the characters. Again what I will give it credit for is giving good spotlight to its female characters in certain arcs especially in arc #3 where the entire arc is dedicated to this one character who is told "a woman cannot fight against a man" with references to Eve being made from Adam in the Bible. But apart from this, they're just kinda 'damsel in distress' stereotype played over and over to a state of exhaustion, which sucks because 5/6 main characters in the manga are females.
The antagonist and villain in this story is the Catholic Church, or well, a very specific section in the Catholic Church dedicated to hunting down witches. They are somewhat refreshing in their writing but get cliche very quickly, bad guy wants power, bad guy wants women, bad guy wants money, etc etc.
The BIG BAD guy however, has somehow the most generic yet most unique idea ever, he wants to create a world where women are constantly hunted as witches., he doesn't want innovation (I literally saw a thread on MAL about a guy hating innovation this morning... don't ask) and wants the world to stay in this 'nobody has electricity and we all hunt down women for fearmongering reasons' time period, which you know what that definitely is something I've never seen before. My guy is like "Say no to modernity return to monke".
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#Overall
I think Tricks Dedicated to Witches was a decently written entertaining manga with some unique ideas and a really good sense of storytelling with a concept that I have never read before in a manga - doing actual David Blaine type magic. It also touches on some societal topics that we never talk about or brush aside and how problematic some of the decisions made with religion were. I think if you're looking for a short, entertaining manga to read in a jiffy, then this would be good. But if you hate cliffhangers, then I would stay away from this. However, I will say that if this had gotten more time to publish, then maybe it could've gotten much much better, and maybe we all missed out on a great manga that's about real life practical magic with proper given explanations. But those dreams went poof like some confetti and smoke... I guess Tricks Dedicated to Witches couldn't even dedicate itself to completion. Pain.
Thank you for reading.