There is a moment in the cups and balls that has existed, essentially unchanged, for at least two thousand years. Seneca described it in Roman times around 45 AD. The ancient wall paintings at Beni Hassan in Egypt, dating to roughly 1900 BC, may depict an even earlier version. And if you perform this effect today, in a conference room in Vienna or a corporate event in Klagenfurt, the audience reaction is the same reaction that audiences have been having for millennia: bewilderment, delight, and something that borders on joy.
I find that fact astonishing. Not the magic itself — the longevity. We live in a world where technology makes entire industries obsolete in a decade. Where entertainment trends cycle faster than seasons. Where what was popular last year is quaint today and forgotten tomorrow. And yet three effects — the cups and balls, the linking rings, and the egg bag — continue to produce genuine astonishment in audiences who carry supercomputers in their pockets and have access to every form of entertainment ever created.
Why? What is it about these specific effects that makes them functionally immortal?
The Egg Bag: Comedy and Charm in a Piece of Cloth
I will start with the one I was most wrong about.
The egg bag, for anyone unfamiliar, is a small cloth bag. An egg goes into the bag. The egg vanishes. The egg comes back. The egg vanishes again. The egg comes back again. This cycle repeats, usually with increasing audience participation and escalating comedy, until a final surprise that the audience never sees coming.
On paper, this sounds like the most basic, least impressive effect imaginable. When I first encountered it, I thought it was a children’s trick. Something a birthday party entertainer would do between balloon animals. I could not imagine performing it at a corporate event without feeling ridiculous.
Then I watched Michael Ammar perform his version. And then I watched several other professionals perform their versions. And I began to understand something that Dariel Fitzkee drives home relentlessly in Showmanship for Magicians: the trick is not the trick. The trick is the performer. The egg bag is not about an egg appearing and disappearing. It is about the relationship between the performer and the audience, played out through the medium of a simple, absurd, endlessly charming prop.
The egg bag works because of its simplicity. Everyone understands what is happening. An egg is in a bag. Then it is not. Then it is again. A child can follow the plot. A CEO can follow the plot. Everyone is on the same page, which means everyone can participate in the same emotional experience at the same time.
And that experience is distinctive. It is not awe or deep philosophical wonder. It is charm. Pure, irresistible charm. The audience finds themselves delighted against their will. They suspect there must be a straightforward explanation. And they do not care, because they are having too much fun watching the performer play with this absurd little bag and this stubborn egg that refuses to stay disappeared.
I added an egg bag routine to my repertoire after watching enough performances to overcome my snobbery. The first time I performed it — at a private corporate dinner in Graz, as an after-dinner entertainment segment — the audience response was unlike anything I had gotten from my more “sophisticated” material. People were laughing, shouting, leaning forward in their chairs. By the final moment of the routine, the entire table was unified in a shared experience of delighted disbelief.
One of the executives at that dinner told me afterward that the egg bag was the highlight of the evening. Not the mentalism piece I had worked on for months. Not the card effect I considered my signature. The egg bag. A cloth bag and an egg.
The Linking Rings: Visual Impossibility You Can See from the Back Row
The linking rings have a different kind of power. Where the egg bag works through charm and comedy, the rings work through sheer visual impossibility.
Solid metal rings pass through each other. They link. They unlink. They form chains, patterns, configurations that should not be possible because metal does not pass through metal. And all of this happens right in front of the audience, in full view, often with the rings being examined before and during the routine.
The visual clarity of this effect is its defining strength. In a large venue, most close-up effects are invisible to anyone beyond the first few rows. The linking rings play to the back of any room. The props are big. The movements are big. The impossibility is big.
I resisted learning the linking rings for the same reason I resisted the egg bag: snobbery. I had seen bad linking rings performances. We all have. The fumbling, the awkward counting, the desperate attempt to show each ring as separate while clearly struggling with the handling. Bad linking rings are painful to watch. And because most of the linking rings performances I had encountered early in my magic education were bad ones, I associated the effect itself with the poor performances I had seen.
This is a common error, and Scott Alexander addresses it directly in his notes. He points out that magicians dismiss classics as “just the Rings” while millions of people have never seen them performed well — or performed at all. The failure of bad performers to do justice to a classic effect is not evidence against the effect. It is evidence against those performers.
When I finally learned the rings properly, from a quality source, and began rehearsing them seriously, I discovered something unexpected: the effect is genuinely beautiful. Not just impressive, not just deceptive, but beautiful. There is a grace to a well-performed linking rings routine that transcends the category of “magic trick.” The rings move and flow and interconnect in ways that look like sculpture in motion. The sound they make — that distinctive metallic ring when they connect — is as much a part of the effect as the visual. It is a complete sensory experience.
The first time I used the rings in a keynote presentation — as a visual metaphor for interconnection and collaboration during a talk about innovation ecosystems — the audience gasped. Not a polite intake of breath. A collective, audible gasp. These were business professionals, technology executives, people who are not easily impressed. And they gasped at linking rings, an effect that has been in magic catalogues for over a century.
The Cups and Balls: Timelessness Itself
The cups and balls hold a special place in my journey because they were one of the first effects that pulled me deeper into magic.
When I was still in the early phase of my obsession — buying online tutorials from ellusionist.com, practicing card moves in hotel rooms, gradually falling down the rabbit hole — I stumbled across a performance by Michael Ammar of the cups and balls. I had been interested primarily in card magic at that point, and I was not particularly drawn to prop-based effects. But something about Ammar’s performance stopped me cold.
It was the audience. Watching their faces. Watching the progression from casual interest to focused attention to genuine disbelief to something that looked very much like wonder. The cups and balls took them on a journey, and by the end of that journey they were in a completely different emotional state than when they started.
That was the moment I understood what magic could be. Not a puzzle to solve. Not a challenge to the audience’s intelligence. An experience that transforms the audience’s emotional state, that takes them from ordinary reality to a place where the impossible feels real, even if only for a few seconds.
The cups and balls achieve this through a structure that is almost musically perfect. The effect builds. It starts small — a ball appears where it should not be. Then it builds — the balls multiply, travel, transpose. Each phase is a little more impossible than the last, a little more undeniable. By the climax, the audience has been led through an escalating series of impossibilities that have progressively dismantled their assumptions about what is happening.
And then comes the final moment, the kicker that lands like a punch to the solar plexus. The audience is expecting one more small miracle, and instead they get something that redefines the entire routine. Everything they thought they understood about what was happening is overturned in a single second.
That structure — the slow build, the escalating impossibilities, the redefining kicker — is the structure of great storytelling. It is the structure of a well-crafted movie, a well-built symphony, a well-told joke. The cups and balls endure because their structure taps into something fundamental about how human beings process narrative. We want to be led somewhere. We want each step to raise the stakes. We want a climax that recontextualizes everything that came before.
The effect has survived because it is, in some fundamental sense, perfect. Not perfect in the “too perfect” way I discussed in the previous post — perfect in the structural, narrative, emotional sense.
Bringing Four Thousand Years Into the Twenty-First Century
This is where I have to talk about something personal, because the cups and balls are not just an effect I perform. They are an effect Adam Wilber and I decided to reimagine.
When we founded Vulpine Creations, we kept coming back to the cups and balls. Here was an effect with a documented history stretching back roughly four thousand years — from those ancient Egyptian wall paintings at Beni Hassan, through Seneca’s Roman-era descriptions, through centuries of street performers and stage magicians — and the core design of the props had barely changed. The method was timeless. The structure was timeless. But the cups themselves? They were still, essentially, the same cups.
We asked ourselves: what would happen if we brought the engineering and design thinking of the twenty-first century to the oldest effect in magic? What if we rebuilt the cups from scratch, not to change the effect but to expand what a performer could do with it?
The result was our Amazing Cups and Beans. I will not get into the specifics of the design — Rule Zero applies here as everywhere — but I will say that the goal was versatility. We wanted a set of cups that would let performers explore dimensions of the cups and balls that traditional sets could not accommodate. More routines. More possibilities. More creative freedom within the framework of a four-thousand-year-old masterpiece.
We brought prototypes to the Blackpool Magic Convention in 2021, not knowing what to expect. What happened was overwhelming. Hundreds of people flooded our stand. The pre-orders were massive.
But the moment that stopped me in my tracks came about a year later, in a conversation with Bill Palmer. Bill holds the title M.I.M.C. — Member of the Inner Magic Circle — and he is the curator of the Cups and Balls Museum. He has dedicated a significant part of his life to collecting, studying, and preserving the history of this single effect. When I tell you he has seen cups and balls sets, I mean he has owned nearly two thousand of them. Two thousand. From antiques to modern productions, from handcrafted artisan sets to mass-produced novelties. If anyone on the planet is qualified to evaluate a new set of cups, it is Bill Palmer.
He examined our Amazing Cups and Beans. He handled them. He tested them. And then he said something that I still think about regularly: “The most versatile set of cups and balls I have ever seen, and I have owned nearly 2,000 sets.”
I am not sharing that quote to sell cups. I am sharing it because it illustrates the point of this entire post. The classics are not museum pieces. They are not relics to be preserved under glass and admired from a distance. They are living, breathing effects that are still capable of evolution, still capable of surprising even the world’s foremost experts. Four thousand years of history, and there is still room to innovate. That is the mark of a truly great effect.
Why These Three Endure
What do the egg bag, the linking rings, and the cups and balls have in common? Why these three, among the thousands of effects that have been invented, reinvented, and forgotten over the centuries?
I think the answer comes down to four qualities.
Clarity. The audience never has to wonder what they are supposed to be watching. The plot is self-evident. Objects appear, disappear, link, unlink, travel. The impossibility is immediately obvious.
Universality. These effects do not depend on language, culture, age, or sophistication. They work for children and for executives, for audiences in Austria and audiences in Japan. The experiences they create are built on perceptions that are fundamentally human.
Adaptability. Each of these effects is, as Scott Alexander puts it, a blank canvas. The egg bag can be comedic or mysterious. The linking rings can be graceful and silent or dramatic and fast. The cups and balls can be performed in virtually any style by virtually any character. The effects impose no personality on the performer, which means any personality can inhabit them.
Escalation. All three effects build. They start with a small impossibility and end with a large one. Each phase is stronger than the last. This built-in dramatic structure is what makes these effects satisfying in a way that many modern single-phase effects cannot match.
The Lesson for Every Performer
I performed a cups and balls routine at a conference in Linz last year, for an audience of about two hundred business professionals. I had not planned to include it. I had been going back and forth about whether it fit the corporate context, whether it was too “traditional” for a keynote about innovation, whether my audience would find it beneath them.
I performed it on an impulse, replacing a mentalism piece that I had been struggling with in rehearsal. I told myself that if it did not work, I would cut it from the set and go back to the mentalism.
The cups and balls brought the house down.
Not politely. Not with golf-clap appreciation. With genuine, vocal, full-room astonishment. Two hundred business professionals reacting to an effect that is older than most civilizations.
Afterward, standing in the lobby with a glass of wine, I overheard someone describing the performance to a colleague who had arrived late: “He had these cups, and these little balls, and they kept appearing and disappearing and then at the end —” and here the person paused, shaking their head, genuinely at a loss for words — “I cannot explain what happened at the end. You had to be there.”
That is the power of a classic. Not the cleverness of the method. Not the novelty of the concept. The power of an experience so clear, so well-structured, so emotionally satisfying that it renders articulate adults temporarily speechless.
These effects are sitting in catalogues and books, waiting for performers to take them seriously. Most magicians walk past them, looking for something newer, something flashier, something that will impress other magicians. Meanwhile, the classics sit there, patient and eternal, ready to devastate any audience that encounters them in the hands of a performer who treats them with the respect they deserve.
Dust them off. Learn them properly. Perform them for real people.
You will wonder why you ever looked down on them.