There is a card effect so simple that the first time I learned it, I almost did not bother practicing it. The entire effect, from the audience’s perspective, could be described in a single sentence. It required no complex technique, no elaborate setup, no multi-phase structure. I learned it in less than an hour.
My immediate reaction was: this cannot be good enough to perform.
Not because I had tested it and found it lacking. Not because someone told me it was weak. But because my brain made an instant, automatic assessment based on a single criterion: how easy it was to learn. Easy to learn meant not impressive. Not impressive meant not worth performing. Not worth performing meant move on to something harder.
That assessment was wrong. The effect, when I finally did perform it months later — almost reluctantly, as a throwaway between “real” pieces — generated one of the strongest reactions I had ever received. A woman at a corporate event in Graz literally grabbed my arm and said, “Do that again.” Not the complex routine I had spent months perfecting. Not the technically demanding piece I was most proud of. The simple thing I had almost discarded.
The bias that nearly cost me that moment is one of the most persistent I have encountered in my journey. I call it the simplicity discount: the automatic, unconscious tendency to devalue effects that are easy to execute, regardless of how they play for an audience.
The Internal Devaluation Machine
The simplicity discount operates through a chain of reasoning that feels airtight from the inside.
Step one: the effect is easy to execute. This is a factual observation. Some effects require extensive practice; others require relatively little.
Step two: if it is easy to execute, anyone could do it. This feels logical but is not necessarily true. Easy to execute does not mean easy to perform well. But the bias does not make this distinction.
Step three: if anyone could do it, it is not special. This is the critical leap. Specialness, in this reasoning, is equated with exclusivity, which is equated with difficulty. Something that many people could do cannot be special.
Step four: if it is not special, it is not worthy of performance. The conclusion follows from the premises, and the entire chain takes about half a second to execute. It happens so fast that you do not even notice it is reasoning. It feels like a direct perception: simple equals weak.
But every link in that chain is either false or irrelevant from the audience’s perspective. The audience does not know how easy the effect is to execute. They have no frame of reference for difficulty. They do not care whether anyone else could do it. They care about one thing: what they experienced. And what they experience is not the method but the effect. The impossibility. The moment when reality seems to break.
A simple effect, performed with conviction and strong presentation, delivers impossibility just as effectively as a complex one. Often more effectively, because the simplicity of the plot means the audience’s attention is focused entirely on the impossible moment rather than distributed across a multi-phase sequence they are struggling to follow.
Where the Bias Comes From
The simplicity discount has its roots in what psychologists call the effort heuristic, which I have written about before in the context of the complexity bias. We assign more value to things that required more effort to produce. A handmade piece of furniture feels more valuable than a machine-made one, even if they look identical. A meal that took hours to prepare feels more special than one that took minutes, even if both taste the same.
This heuristic is deeply embedded in human psychology, and in many contexts it serves us well. Effort is often correlated with quality. The problem arises when the correlation breaks down — when effort and quality diverge — and the heuristic keeps operating as if they are still linked.
In magic, the correlation between method difficulty and effect quality is weak to nonexistent. Some of the most powerful effects in the history of the art form are methodologically simple. Some of the most technically demanding routines leave audiences cold. Method and effect exist in different dimensions, connected by the performer’s skill but not by any reliable correlation.
The simplicity discount ignores this disconnect. It imports the effort heuristic from everyday life into a domain where it does not apply and uses it to make judgments that are systematically wrong.
The second source of the bias is social comparison within the magic community. Among magicians, there is an unspoken hierarchy that elevates difficulty. Performers who execute complex techniques are admired. Performers who rely on simple methods are sometimes dismissed as “beginners” or “shortcut artists.” The social currency of the community rewards difficulty, creating an incentive structure that pushes performers toward complexity even when simplicity would serve the audience better.
I have felt this pressure personally. At magic gatherings, showing a simple effect invites a particular kind of dismissal — the knowing nod that says “I already know that one.” The implication being that if the method is known and simple, the effect cannot be worth performing. But the people in that room are not the audience. They are colleagues. And confusing the judgment of colleagues with the experience of audiences is one of the most common and costly mistakes a performer can make.
The David Blaine Lesson
Darwin Ortiz makes a point in his writing about strong magic that I think about constantly. He argues that the greatest effects in magic are almost always describable in a single sentence. A card is chosen, lost in the deck, and found in an impossible location. A coin vanishes from one hand and appears in the other. A prediction matches a freely made choice.
These are not complex plots. They are simple, direct, and immediately understandable. And they generate the strongest reactions precisely because of their simplicity. The audience does not need to track multiple phases. They do not need to remember what happened three steps ago. They experience a single, clear impossibility, and that impossibility hits them with full force because nothing dilutes it.
David Blaine built an entire career on this principle. His street magic — the material that made him famous — is often astonishingly simple in concept. A card is thought of. The deck is cut. That is the spectator’s card. The simplicity of the plot focuses all the audience’s attention and emotion on the single moment of impossibility. There is nothing to be confused about, nothing to track, nothing to remember. Just a clear, impossible thing that happened right in front of them.
When I watched Blaine’s early specials, my performer’s brain kept wanting to dismiss them. “That is so simple.” “I could do that.” “There is not enough there.” But then the cameras would show the spectators’ reactions — the screaming, the disbelief, the moments where people physically backed away from the impossibility — and I had to confront the fact that my dismissal was the bias talking, not a legitimate evaluation.
The spectators were not thinking “That was too simple.” They were thinking “That was impossible.” And impossible, delivered cleanly and with conviction, is the most powerful thing a performer can achieve.
The Performance Gap
Here is the thing the simplicity discount obscures: simple effects are not easy to perform well. They are, in many ways, harder to perform well than complex ones.
When you perform a multi-phase routine with complex handling, the method itself provides structure. You have things to do. Your hands are busy. The sequence of events creates its own momentum. The complexity fills the performance space.
When you perform a simple effect, there is nowhere to hide. The method takes seconds. The structure is minimal. And everything between the setup and the climax is you. Your presence. Your conviction. Your ability to create meaning and tension and anticipation from almost nothing.
This is why the simplicity discount is so ironic. The bias tells you that simple effects are not worthy of performance because they are easy. But performing them at the level that generates strong reactions is one of the hardest things in magic. The effect may be simple. The performance required to make it land is anything but.
Joshua Jay, in his writing on magic philosophy, makes a distinction that I find illuminating here. He talks about the difference between the method and the magic. The method is what the performer does. The magic is what the audience experiences. A simple method does not produce simple magic. It produces clean, direct, undiluted magic — the kind that hits hardest.
The simplicity discount confuses method with magic. It assumes that because the method is simple, the magic must be simple too. But the audience never sees the method. They only see the magic. And the magic of a simple, direct impossibility, performed by someone who fully inhabits the moment, is more powerful than the magic of a complex, multi-phase routine performed by someone who is merely executing technique.
How I Retrained My Instincts
Overcoming the simplicity discount was not a matter of reading about it and being cured. The bias is too deeply embedded for intellectual understanding to override it. I needed to retrain my instincts through repeated experience.
The process started with a deliberate experiment. I selected three simple effects — effects I had learned quickly and dismissed as “not enough” — and I committed to performing them for real audiences over the course of a month. Not as throwaways or filler. As featured pieces. I gave them the same attention, the same presentation development, the same performance energy that I gave my “real” material.
The results were humbling. Two of the three simple effects outperformed pieces that had been in my set for much longer and had required far more practice to learn. Not by a small margin. By a lot. The reactions were stronger, more immediate, and more memorable.
The third effect did not land well. But when I analyzed why, it was not because the effect was too simple. It was because my presentation was weak. I had not invested enough creative energy into it, precisely because the simplicity discount had told me it was not worth the investment. The effect was fine. The problem was that my bias had caused me to half-commit to the performance, which the audience could feel.
After that month, I revised my evaluation criteria. I stopped asking “Is this effect complex enough?” and started asking “Does this effect create a clear moment of impossibility?” I stopped asking “Would other magicians be impressed by this?” and started asking “Would a stranger remember this tomorrow?”
These new questions consistently led me toward simpler, more direct material. Material that required less learning time but more performance investment. Material that left me more exposed but generated stronger reactions. Material that my bias had been telling me was not enough, when in fact it was more than enough — it was exactly what the audience wanted.
The Ongoing Battle
I wish I could say the simplicity discount is behind me. It is not. The bias still fires every time I encounter a new effect that is easy to learn. My first instinct is still to dismiss it. “Too simple.” “Not enough there.” “Anyone could do this.”
But now I recognize that instinct for what it is — a cognitive bias, not a legitimate evaluation — and I override it. I give the simple effect a chance. I invest performance energy into it. I test it on real audiences and let the reactions tell me what my instincts cannot.
Sometimes the simple effect really is too thin. Not every simple idea is a winner. But far more often than my bias would predict, the simple, direct, clean impossibility outperforms the elaborate construction that my ego wanted to build around it.
The hardest lesson I have learned in magic is this: the audience does not care how hard it was. They care how it felt. And often, the simplest path to a feeling of genuine impossibility is the simplest effect, performed by someone who believes in it completely and refuses to apologize for its simplicity.
That voice that says “But it looks too easy” is not your artistic judgment. It is a bias. And every time you listen to it and pass over a simple, powerful effect in favor of a complex, impressive-looking one, you are optimizing for your ego instead of your audience. The audience deserves better. And so do you.