The Tricks Every Magician Should Consider Owning

It's the one question I get asked the most, and I am finally going to answer it. For the past several years, I've been toying with the best way to write an article on this topic without it feeling like a blog post or a sales push. I'm not at all affiliated with any of the items listed below (though friends of mine published some of them).

What I will say is that I've come at this from the perspective of someone who works behind the scenes on TV magic shows. Something most magicians often forget to consider is that TV magicians will perform upwards of one hundred tricks in a TV series. That is an insane number of new magic tricks to learn and shoot – often in a very concise period.

TV magicians very quickly become masters at taking home the tricks for the next day's shoot and learning how to perform them at home that evening. It will never fail to amaze me when a TV performer arrives at a shoot and can expertly perform a trick that didn't exist a week ago and was only put in their hands the night before. A lot of them will make changes and improvements to them, too.

So, I'm going to outline what essentially is the tool chest of any magician hoping to one day be on TV in some fashion. With the tricks below, you'll be able to cover almost every genre of fresh-feeling magic in adaptive ways. It's a grab-and-go style list of material magicians should really own and learn if they want to work with consultants and producers and turn around new magic fast.

Cards

I have never worked on a single show where the channel didn't plead with us to avoid using cards at all costs. The stats do not lie – people change the channel or switch off the TV when you pull out a deck of cards. However, cards are an easy fallback and their uses can be adapted for other tricks.

Forces

The three best force decks for television are the Mind Power Deck, the Pop-Eyed Popper Deck, and the One Way Force Deck.

If magic product reviewers didn't care about pocket space so much, they'd tell you the same. Luckily, TV magicians do not need to worry about pocket space, and neither do the majority of dedicated hobbyist magicians around the world.

Peeks

I recommend getting your hands on an Extractor, which allows you to remove a signed card from a deck secretly. Then, if you want a marked deck, I always suggest The Code. Finally, if you're made of money, you can buy one of those fancy decks of cards with chips in them that a reader can sense from a distance.