There is a moment in Pete McCabe’s Scripting Magic where David Regal lays out his framework for building a magic presentation. It is called Power, Premise, and Presentation, and when I first encountered it, I thought it was an interesting organizational tool. A tidy way to think about scripting. Nothing more.
Then I read Darwin Ortiz’s Designing Miracles, and I realized Regal’s framework was not just an organizational tool. It was a design philosophy. And it converged with Ortiz’s thinking in ways that neither author had explicitly connected but that became obvious once you put them side by side.
The convergence changed how I approach every new effect I work on.
Regal’s Three Questions
Regal’s framework starts with three questions, asked in order:
First: Where does the power come from? Why does this magic happen? What is the source of the impossible? Is it the performer’s skill? A magical object? A connection between two people? An ancient force? The answer does not have to be literally true — it has to be dramatically convincing.
Second: What is the premise? Given the source of power, what is the specific scenario being played out? If the power comes from a magical connection between two people, the premise might be a demonstration of synchronized intuition. If the power comes from an object, the premise might be a story about where the object came from and what it can do.
Third: What is the presentation? Given the power source and the premise, what words, actions, and structure will communicate this to the audience? The presentation is the last thing you design, not the first.
Most magicians do this backward. They start with a presentation — a script, a bit of patter, a joke — and try to attach it to a trick. Or worse, they start with a method and try to build everything else around it. Regal insists you start with why, move to what, and only then arrive at how.
The Ortiz Convergence
Now here is where it gets interesting. Darwin Ortiz, working from a completely different angle in Designing Miracles, arrives at essentially the same conclusion through a different route.
Ortiz’s central thesis is that most magic fails because the performer focuses on method (how do I fool them?) rather than on design (how do I make this feel impossible?). He distinguishes between deception — merely fooling someone so they do not know how you did it — and illusion — creating the genuine experience of impossibility. The first produces puzzles. The second produces miracles.
Ortiz’s design framework centers on the audience’s psychological experience. He asks: what will the audience think? What causal connections will they search for? What false explanations will they generate? How can I design the effect so that every avenue of rational explanation leads to a dead end?
When I mapped Regal’s framework onto Ortiz’s, the alignment was striking.
Regal’s “Power” corresponds to Ortiz’s concept of eliminating causal cues. When you establish a clear source of power, you give the audience a framework for understanding why the impossible happened — a framework that happens to point away from the actual method. If the power comes from a magical object, the audience’s causal reasoning focuses on the object rather than on your hands. If the power comes from a psychological connection, they think about the connection rather than about the technique.
Regal’s “Premise” corresponds to what Ortiz calls the false frame of reference. The premise tells the audience what kind of thing they are watching. And that frame determines what explanations they will search for. A premise about luck leads them to search for statistical explanations. A premise about intuition leads them to search for psychological explanations. A premise about skill leads them to search for technical explanations. Each frame sends them down a different analytical path — and if that path does not intersect with the actual method, they will never find the answer.
Regal’s “Presentation” corresponds to Ortiz’s emphasis on conviction and the management of the critical interval. The presentation is where you control timing, emphasis, attention, and emotional arc — all the elements that determine whether the audience experiences a puzzle or a miracle.
Why Starting with Power Matters
I want to spend some time on the first question — where does the power come from? — because I think it is the one most performers skip entirely, and it is the one that makes the biggest difference.
When I first started performing, I had no answer to this question for any of my effects. I was a guy doing tricks. The implicit source of power was: I know something you do not. I have practiced a skill that you cannot see. This is the default position for most magicians, and it is the weakest possible source of power because it immediately frames the performance as a puzzle. The audience knows that the “power” is just knowledge and practice. Their job, therefore, is to figure out what you know and what you practiced. They are in problem-solving mode from the first moment.
The breakthrough for me came when I started assigning different power sources to different effects. For a card effect, the power might come from a claimed sensitivity to the physical properties of the cards — a gambler’s ability to detect differences invisible to normal people. For a mentalism piece, the power might come from a psychological technique that anyone could learn if they knew where to look. For a prediction effect, the power might come from the idea that coincidence is not as random as we believe — that there are patterns in human behavior that can be read by someone paying close enough attention.
None of these explanations are literally true. But each one gives the audience something more interesting to think about than “how did he do that?” Each one creates a world in which the magic makes sense on its own terms. And each one, as Ortiz would say, sends the audience’s causal reasoning down a path that does not intersect with the actual method.
The Premise as World-Building
The premise is where Regal’s framework connects to something Pete McCabe explores extensively in Scripting Magic 2: the idea that every performance exists within a world, and if you do not define that world, the audience defaults to “a guy doing a trick.”
A premise is not just a story. It is a set of rules. If your premise is that you have a deck of cards that was hand-printed by a playing card forger in the nineteenth century, you have established a world with specific properties. The audience enters that world. They accept its logic. And within that logic, impossible things become more plausible — not because the audience literally believes your story, but because they are thinking within a framework that accommodates strangeness.
I learned this the hard way during a performance in Vienna. I was doing a mentalism piece at a corporate event, and my premise was weak — essentially “let me show you something interesting.” The effect was strong, but the premise gave the audience nothing to hold onto. When the impossible moment arrived, they were impressed but not transported. They had nowhere to go with the experience because I had not built them a world to inhabit.
A few weeks later, I performed the same effect with a completely different premise — one grounded in a true story about how pattern recognition works in consulting, and how the same principles that help me read markets might help me read people. The effect was identical. The experience was completely different. The audience was engaged from the opening sentence because the premise gave them a framework, a reason to care, a world in which what I was about to do made sense.
Design First, Method Last
Both Regal and Ortiz insist on the same priority: design the experience first, choose the method last. Ortiz puts it bluntly: “The only thing that matters about a method is how impossible an effect it produces, not how good it makes you feel inside.”
This was a hard lesson for me. When I started in magic, I collected methods the way some people collect stamps. I loved the ingenuity. I loved the cleverness. I loved the feeling of understanding how something worked. And when I chose effects to perform, I chose them based on which methods I found most satisfying to execute.
This is backward. The audience does not care about your method. They cannot see it. They do not know it exists. What they experience is the effect — the gap between what they thought was happening and what actually happened. And the size of that gap is determined by design, not by method.
Regal’s framework enforces this by putting Power first. If you start by asking “where does the power come from?”, you are thinking about the audience’s experience before you think about your own. If you start by asking “what cool method can I use?”, you are thinking about your experience before you think about theirs.
Ortiz reinforces this by systematically demolishing every criterion for choosing a method except one: how impossible an effect it produces. Cleverness is irrelevant if the audience does not experience impossibility. Difficulty is irrelevant — and often counterproductive, since harder methods introduce more risk without necessarily increasing the audience’s experience. Novelty is meaningless to an audience that does not know what methods you have used before.
The only thing that matters is what the audience experiences. Both Regal and Ortiz, coming from different directions, arrive at the same conclusion.
The Three Questions as Daily Practice
I now use Regal’s three questions as a diagnostic tool for every effect in my repertoire. Before I perform anything, I should be able to answer all three clearly and quickly.
Where does the power come from? If I cannot answer this in one sentence, the effect is not ready.
What is the premise? If the premise is “I am going to show you a trick,” the effect is not ready.
What is the presentation? If the presentation is procedural narration — “I am going to mix these cards, now I am going to deal them” — the effect is not ready.
These three questions have eliminated more weak material from my act than any other single tool. Effects that I thought were strong turned out to have no clear power source. Routines I had been performing for months turned out to have no real premise — just a collection of moments strung together by procedural instructions. Presentations that felt polished turned out to be disconnected from the power and premise, floating free of any underlying logic.
The Complete System
When you combine Regal’s three questions with Ortiz’s design principles, you get a complete system for creating magic that transcends puzzlement and reaches wonder.
Start with the audience’s experience. Ask what you want them to feel, not what you want them to see. Establish a source of power that directs their causal reasoning away from the method. Build a premise that creates a world in which the magic makes sense on its own terms. Design a presentation that controls timing, attention, and emotional arc. Choose a method last — the simplest, most reliable method that produces the desired experience.
Then ask Ortiz’s diagnostic questions. Where will the audience search for causal connections? Have you separated the method from the effect in time, space, and concept? Is the audience asking the right question — which, from your perspective, means the wrong question? Will their memory of the effect survive their rational analysis?
This is how you design a miracle. Not from the inside out — starting with what you know and building outward. But from the outside in — starting with what the audience experiences and working backward to find the simplest path to get there.
Power. Premise. Presentation. Three words that changed how I think about every moment I spend on stage.