I Wish

I wish we lived in a world where magicians (or, I suppose, people in general) weren't dicks and we could openly talk about methods when selling a trick. I hate that we have to list off a big thing full of what the trick isn't (which in my mind just invites speculation and guessing more than anything) instead of just being able to say "Here's how it works," and have people still buy it.

I'm sure we all at one point or another have fallen victim to hype of some sort or another in our magic careers. Usually either the list of "No's" makes it sound like the holy grail of magic and in reality you get a convoluted handling to fit the criteria they set, or it turns out that the conditions you normally perform under aren't compatible with the handling. Then there's the issue of demo videos that don't tell the whole story, but that's a whole other post by itself.

What I would love, and I know this is a complete pipe dream fantasy world, is if a new trick told you how it worked and you could make an informed decision about whether or not you wanted to buy it. If you liked it, you'd pay the money and perform it, almost like a licensing fee. If you didn't like it, you would be a reasonable person and not perform it because you haven't purchased the license.

It would be nice to see the gimmick and find out before you drop cash on it that it's flimsy and hard to handle. It would be good to know that you require a stooge to watch what your spectator does before you spend your hard earned money and realize you have no friends. Imagine how the reviews would change. Instead of reading "The 'secret something' can be a bit fiddly, but there are ways around that. You'll know what I mean when you see it." we could have reviews like, "The gimmicked card has a tendency to slide off the top of the deck, but you can use your third finger to hold it. I haven't found it to be that big of an issue in real life."

No longer would we see ads like:
No rough and smooth!
No thread!
No wire!
No magnets!
No puffs of air!
No duplicate!
No switching!
No stooges!

Instead we would see:
This requires a piece of double sided tape and a solid billet peek.

But we will never get to that point because magic is all about the secrets, and magicians are dicks and won't pay if you give them the secret for free. Hell, I'd be happy if more (or any, really) magic shops offered refunds if you don't like a product. Sure, you'd probably still get dicks that just put money down on one trick and keep refunding and buying new ones but I feel like that would take effort and there would be fewer that do that than if you just openly advertised the secret.

I know this will never happen, but I can dream. If I ever get the chance to sell something I've created, I'd like to experiment with some truth in advertising and see how well it goes. Probably about as well as I expect it to, which is why people don't already do this.

You're all a bunch of dicks.

- Andster