The box arrived at my apartment in Vienna on a Tuesday afternoon. It was heavy, impressively packaged, and had cost me more than I want to admit. Inside was a beautifully crafted prop — lacquered wood, brass fittings, a velvet interior. It looked like something a sorcerer would own. It practically hummed with mystery.
I set it up on my desk, practiced the handling for a week, and then performed it at a small corporate event in Graz. The effect was solid. An object vanished from inside the box and appeared somewhere impossible. The method was clean. The engineering was elegant. I was proud of it.
The reaction was polite applause. Smiles. A few nods. Then the audience moved on.
Later that same evening, I borrowed a coin from one of the attendees, made it vanish, and found it somewhere unexpected. No fancy box. No brass fittings. No lacquered anything. Just a coin that someone pulled out of their own pocket.
The reaction was completely different. People leaned in. Someone actually said “wait, what?” out loud. The person whose coin it was kept looking at their hands like the laws of physics had personally betrayed them.
Same performer. Same evening. Same audience. Radically different impact. And the difference had nothing to do with skill or method. It had everything to do with the objects involved.
The Glitter Trap
When I first started accumulating magic props, I was drawn to things that looked magical. That seems logical, right? You’re performing magic, so your tools should look the part. I bought ornate boxes, colorful tubes, chrome-plated devices, and props that screamed “I am mysterious and exotic.” My prop case looked like the inventory of an eccentric antiques dealer.
What I didn’t understand was that every one of those objects was creating distance between me and my audience before I even started performing.
Darwin Ortiz addresses this directly in Strong Magic, and when I read his argument, something clicked that I’d been sensing but couldn’t articulate. Ortiz argues that recognizable, everyday objects create fundamentally stronger magic than exotic or “magical-looking” props. The reasoning is almost embarrassingly simple once you see it.
When you place a glittering box on the table, every person in the room immediately thinks the same thing: “There’s something about that box.” They don’t know what the box does, but they know it does something. The box itself becomes suspect. The audience’s analytical machinery kicks into gear before you’ve said a single word. You’ve essentially announced, “I have a trick device, and I’m about to trick you with it.”
When you place a coin on the table — a regular coin, the kind everyone has in their pocket — nobody thinks anything. There is nothing to suspect. The coin is invisible in the sense that it registers as completely unremarkable. And when that unremarkable coin does something impossible, the impossibility lands with its full weight because there was nowhere for the audience’s suspicion to go.
The Relatability Factor
There’s a deeper principle at work beyond mere suspicion. It has to do with how people relate to objects.
I tested this without meaning to during a keynote I delivered at a conference in Salzburg. I was talking about perception and assumption in business strategy, and I wanted to illustrate how our expectations blind us to what’s right in front of us. I had two options: use a specialty prop from my case, or use the newspaper that was sitting on the podium — a copy of the Salzburger Nachrichten that someone had left there.
I went with the newspaper. I picked it up, referenced a headline, talked about how we read the news through the lens of our existing beliefs, and then something impossible happened to that newspaper. I won’t describe the effect itself, but the reaction was volcanic. People talked about it during the coffee break. Multiple attendees mentioned it in their feedback forms.
The newspaper worked because everyone in that room had held a newspaper. They understood its weight, its texture, its properties. They had a physical and emotional relationship with that object. When something impossible happened to it, the impossibility was personal. It happened to something they knew.
This is the relatability factor. A decorated magic box exists only in the context of a magic show. It has no life outside that context. A coin exists in the context of buying coffee this morning. A ring exists in the context of a marriage, a family, a life. A newspaper exists in the context of reading the news over breakfast. When magic happens to objects that have a life outside the performance, the magic bleeds into the real world.
Why I Stopped Buying Specialty Props
I didn’t stop all at once. It was gradual — a slow realization over maybe eighteen months that my strongest performances almost never involved my most expensive props.
I started tracking it informally. After each performance, whether it was a close-up set at a networking event in Linz or a segment during a keynote in Vienna, I’d note which effects got the strongest reactions. Not just applause, but the reactions that mattered: the sharp intake of breath, the person who grabbed their friend’s arm, the volunteer who looked genuinely shaken by what just happened.
A pattern emerged quickly. The effects with everyday objects consistently outperformed the ones with specialty props. Cards beat ornate boxes. Borrowed coins beat chrome cylinders. A simple envelope beat an elaborate prediction device.
The pattern wasn’t subtle. It was overwhelming.
I started looking at my prop case differently. That lacquered box with the brass fittings? It went into a drawer. The beautiful production device with the velvet lining? Same drawer. One by one, the flashy, expensive, magical-looking props got retired, and my working set shrank to things you’d find in anyone’s pocket or on anyone’s desk.
The Exception That Proves the Rule
There are contexts where elaborate props work brilliantly. Large-scale stage illusions are their own world, and nobody expects a stage performer to make a volunteer disappear using only a newspaper.
But for close-up magic, parlor magic, and the kind of performance I do in keynotes and corporate settings — where I’m working at conversational distance — recognizable objects are almost always superior.
I still use a few specialty items, but only when the prop itself has a narrative reason to exist. If I’m telling a story about something specific, and the prop connects to that story, the prop earns its place. What I’ve eliminated is the generic magical-looking prop — the object that has no reason to look the way it does except to signal “I am a magic prop.”
The Everyday Object Checklist
Over time, I developed an informal test for whether an object belongs in my performance. I ask three questions:
First, would this object look normal on a kitchen table? If you walked into someone’s house and saw this object lying on their table, would you think anything of it? If yes, it’s suspicious. If no, it’s probably fine.
Second, does the audience already know what this object is? If I have to explain what the object is or what it does in its normal life, I’ve already lost ground. The audience should recognize it instantly. A coin. A rubber band. A piece of rope. A book. These register immediately. A chrome tube with mysterious markings requires explanation, and explanation creates distance.
Third, could the audience get one of these themselves? This is the subtlest test, but it’s important. If the object is something anyone could buy at a store or find in their home, the impossibility is amplified because the audience knows there’s nothing special about the object itself. If the object can only be purchased from a magic dealer, the audience intuitively senses — even if they can’t prove — that the object is doing the work.
The Professional Implications
This shift toward everyday objects also changed my professional image in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
When I performed with ornate magical props, I looked like a magician. A performer. Someone doing a show. There’s nothing wrong with that in certain contexts, but in the corporate keynote world where I spend most of my performing time, looking like a magician actually undermines what I’m trying to do. I’m not there to do a magic show. I’m there to talk about strategy, innovation, and human perception, and to use moments of impossibility to illuminate those ideas.
When I perform with everyday objects — a coin, a deck of cards, a piece of paper, a borrowed phone — I don’t look like a magician doing tricks. I look like a speaker who happens to be able to do extraordinary things with ordinary objects. That distinction matters enormously in a corporate context. It’s the difference between being an act and being a speaker. Between being entertainment and being a thought leader who uses entertainment.
The everyday objects also support the core message I’m usually delivering in my keynotes: that the extraordinary is hidden inside the ordinary, that the things we take for granted are more remarkable than we realize, and that our assumptions about what is “normal” blind us to possibilities.
When a coin does something impossible, that message lands physically. The audience doesn’t just hear me say that the ordinary contains the extraordinary — they experience it happening right in front of them. The prop and the message become one.
What This Means for Choosing Material
If you’re evaluating whether a new effect belongs in your repertoire, one of the first questions to ask is: what objects does it use?
An effect that uses a deck of cards starts with an advantage. An effect that uses a borrowed ring starts with a bigger advantage. An effect that uses a glittering box with no real-world equivalent starts with a disadvantage that even great performance can only partially overcome.
This doesn’t mean you should refuse to consider any effect that uses a specialty prop. It means you should be honest about the cost. The prop imposes a tax on the effect’s impact, and you need to decide whether what the effect delivers is worth paying that tax.
In my experience, the answer is usually no. There is almost always a version of the same basic effect that can be achieved with everyday objects, and that version will almost always be stronger.
I think about this every time I’m tempted by something new. The magic dealer’s website is full of gorgeous, cleverly engineered props that look incredible. But gorgeous and cleverly engineered are features that impress magicians. Audiences don’t care about engineering. They care about impossibility.
And impossibility is most powerful when it happens to things they already know.
The Coin on the Table
I go back to that evening in Graz sometimes, mentally. The expensive box sitting on the table, drawing polite respect. The borrowed coin, held in someone’s own hands, drawing genuine astonishment.
The box was designed to impress. The coin was designed to spend at a coffee shop.
And that was exactly why the coin won.
The simplest objects carry the least suspicion, require the least explanation, and create the most direct connection between the impossible event and the audience’s understanding of reality. Every layer of ornamentation, every brass fitting, every velvet lining is a layer of distance between the magic and the person watching.
Strip it away. Use what people know. Let the magic speak for itself.
That lacquered box is still in my drawer, by the way. It’s beautiful. I look at it sometimes and appreciate the craftsmanship. But I haven’t performed with it in over two years. And my performances are better for it.