I counted them on a Saturday morning in my apartment in Vienna. Forty-seven effects. Props, gimmicks, decks, books, downloads, packages — forty-seven separate purchases from magic dealers, online shops, conventions, and recommendations from fellow magicians.
Of those forty-seven, I was actively performing six. Six effects were in my working repertoire. The other forty-one were sitting in drawers, boxes, and a shelf in my closet that I had started calling “the graveyard.” Some were still in their original packaging. A few had their instruction booklets still wrapped in cellophane. Most had been tried once — maybe twice — before being set aside in favor of the next purchase.
I stood there staring at the graveyard and felt a specific kind of shame. Not because I’d spent money — though I had, more than was comfortable to total up — but because I realized I was treating effects like a consumer, not a performer. Buy, try, discard, buy again. The endless pursuit of the next thing, while a drawer full of possibilities sat unopened.
That Saturday morning began one of the most productive weekends of my magic education.
The Accumulation Habit
I need to be honest about how the graveyard formed, because I think the pattern is common and I think understanding it matters.
The cycle worked like this. I’d see a new effect — in a lecture, on a magic forum, in a dealer’s demo video — and feel that surge of excitement. This could be the one. I’d imagine performing it, imagine the reactions. I’d buy it, often the same day.
The package would arrive. I’d read the instructions, learn the handling, try it a few times. And then — almost inevitably — the handling would feel awkward, or the angles would be tricky, or the effect would feel less compelling in my hands than in the creator’s tutorial.
A rational person would say: “Give it three weeks of practice, then evaluate.” But I was being a consumer, not a craftsman. And the consumer’s response to mild dissatisfaction is not “work harder at this” but “find something better.” So the effect would go into the drawer, and within a week or two, I’d be watching a new demo video, reaching for my credit card.
Darwin Ortiz has a line in Strong Magic that captures this perfectly: “The fact that you like a trick is not enough reason to perform it.” But I’d add a corollary that Ortiz implies without stating directly: the fact that a trick didn’t immediately feel right is not enough reason to abandon it. Between “this is perfect” and “this doesn’t work” lies an enormous territory of “this could become something with investment” — and I was skipping that territory entirely.
The Inventory Weekend
So that Saturday morning, I pulled everything out. Every effect, every prop, every abandoned project. I spread them across my living room floor like an archaeologist cataloging finds, and I made a decision: I would go through every single one with fresh eyes. No preconceptions. No memory of why I’d set it aside. Just the effect itself, evaluated as if I were encountering it for the first time.
I created a simple framework for the evaluation. Three questions for each effect:
One: What does the audience see? Not the method, not the handling — what is the spectator’s experience? I described each effect from the outside, in plain language, as if telling a friend what happened. “A coin vanishes and appears in an impossible location.” “A prediction written beforehand matches a free choice.” “An object changes while the spectator holds it.”
Two: Is that experience compelling? Does the description make a non-magician lean in? Would someone want to see that? I tried to strip away all my knowledge of the method and my feelings about the handling and just evaluate whether the effect itself — the story the audience experiences — was worth telling.
Three: What would need to change for this to work for me? Not “is it perfect right now” but “what stands between this and my repertoire?” Sometimes the answer was “nothing — I just didn’t give it enough practice time.” Sometimes it was “the presentation needs complete rethinking.” Sometimes it was “this genuinely isn’t for me.”
The evaluation took most of Saturday and all of Sunday morning. I went through all forty-one abandoned effects. I took notes. I performed each one for myself, slowly, paying attention to what felt wrong and what felt right.
Three Discoveries
Here’s what happened: of the forty-one effects I evaluated, three turned out to be genuinely strong pieces that I’d dismissed prematurely. Not effects that were merely adequate — effects that were actually excellent, effects that eventually became core parts of my working repertoire.
The first was an effect I’d bought over a year earlier and tried exactly once. The handling had felt clunky, and I’d put it down. What I realized during the inventory weekend was that the handling felt clunky because I hadn’t practiced it enough. The creator’s tutorial showed a polished, confident performance after years of refinement. I was comparing my first attempt to their thousandth. Of course it felt awkward. When I committed to three weeks of focused practice — working through the handling in my hotel room on a business trip to Salzburg, refining it night after night — the clumsiness dissolved and the effect revealed itself as one of the strongest pieces I own. It’s now a regular part of my close-up repertoire.
The second was an effect I’d abandoned because I didn’t like the original presentation. The method was clean and the visual was striking, but the suggested patter was corny and didn’t fit my style. I’d made the classic mistake of confusing the presentation with the effect. The presentation was bad. The effect was excellent. When I stripped away the creator’s suggested script and built my own — connecting it to my keynote themes of perception and assumption — the effect came alive. It now opens one of my keynote segments.
The third was the most surprising. It was an effect I’d dismissed as “too simple.” The method was straightforward, the props were minimal, and the climax seemed almost anticlimactic compared to the more elaborate effects in my collection. I’d bought it on a recommendation, tried it once, shrugged, and buried it.
What I hadn’t appreciated was that its simplicity was its strength. The effect was so clean, so direct, so instantly understandable that the audience had no confusion clouding their astonishment. There was nothing to figure out, nothing to analyze, nothing standing between the spectator and the pure experience of impossibility. I’d been so conditioned to value complexity that I couldn’t see the power of simplicity until I looked at it with fresh eyes.
Why I’d Missed Them
Looking back, the reasons I’d overlooked these three effects fell into predictable categories — categories I now watch for in myself and other performers.
The instant gratification filter. I expected effects to feel good immediately. If the handling wasn’t comfortable after twenty minutes, I moved on. This is absurd. No worthwhile skill feels comfortable after twenty minutes. I wouldn’t expect to play a new piano piece comfortably after twenty minutes, but I expected magic to be different? The effects I abandoned for “feeling clunky” were simply effects that required the investment of practice I was unwilling to make at the time.
The creator’s voice filter. When an effect comes with a suggested presentation that doesn’t match your style, it’s easy to reject the entire package. But the presentation is just one possible clothing for the effect. The effect underneath — the audience’s experience — is independent of the creator’s words. Separating the method from the original presentation is a skill in itself, and one I hadn’t developed yet when I was building the graveyard.
The complexity bias. Coming from the consulting world, I had an unconscious bias toward complexity. Complex must be better. Sophisticated must be superior. This bias is poison in magic. Some of the most powerful effects in the entire art form are structurally simple. A coin vanishes. A card appears. A prediction matches. The audience doesn’t award points for complexity. They award attention for impact.
The shiny object syndrome. This one is simple: new is exciting, and existing is boring. The effect I’ve owned for a year generates no novelty response. The effect I just saw in a demo video generates a huge novelty response. My purchasing decisions were being driven by dopamine, not analysis.
The Systematic Review
The inventory weekend was valuable enough that I now do a version of it every six months. Not as comprehensive as the first one — I don’t have forty-one abandoned effects anymore, because I buy far less now — but a deliberate review of everything I own and everything I perform.
The process has evolved. I now evaluate effects on a few additional dimensions:
Audience feedback patterns. Over months of performing, certain effects consistently produce stronger reactions than others. The review forces me to confront this honestly. There are effects I love performing that the audience merely likes. There are effects I feel neutral about that the audience adores. The audience’s opinion should win.
Changed context. My performing context has evolved. Effects that made sense when I was mostly doing informal close-up at networking events may not fit now that more of my performing happens in keynote settings. The reverse is also true — effects I dismissed as “too big” for my early casual performances might be perfect now.
Evolved skill. My skill level is different now than it was two years ago. Effects I couldn’t handle technically when I first bought them might be well within my ability now. The graveyard might contain pieces I wasn’t ready for but am ready for now.
The Economic Argument
The consultant in me appreciates the straightforward economics. Every new effect costs money. But the effects already in your possession cost nothing additional. Their acquisition cost is sunk. The only investment required is time and attention.
From a return-on-investment perspective, spending ten hours developing an effect you already own is almost always better than spending fifty euros on a new effect you’ll try once and abandon. The existing effect has been pre-screened by your past self — you bought it because something about it appealed to you. That initial appeal was probably legitimate. What failed wasn’t the effect; what failed was your patience.
I calculated once what the effects in my graveyard had cost me. The number was embarrassing. More embarrassing was the realization that three of my best current effects came from that graveyard — effects I’d already paid for and was simply ignoring.
The Deeper Lesson
We live in a culture of acquisition. More is better. New is better. The next thing is the right thing. This culture drives a lot of unnecessary purchasing in magic, but it also drives unnecessary seeking in general — the assumption that what you need is out there, waiting to be found, rather than here, already in your possession, waiting to be developed.
The three effects I discovered during my inventory weekend didn’t require me to go anywhere or buy anything. They required me to stop looking outward and start looking at what I already had. To trust that the initial instinct that led me to purchase those effects was probably correct, even if my initial execution wasn’t.
If you’ve been performing for any length of time, set aside a weekend. Pull out everything. Every abandoned effect, every shelved prop. Go through each one with the three questions: What does the audience see? Is it compelling? What would need to change?
The graveyard isn’t a graveyard. It’s a seed bank. Some of those seeds just needed different soil, or a different season, or a gardener who had learned a few more things since the last time they tried.
Your next best effect might not be a purchase.
It might be a rediscovery.