1. Home
  2. Hobbies & Games
  3. Magic & Illusion

StepByStep Index - page 2

Easy Magic Tricks: The Magnetic Pencil 2
Here's a great enhancement on a well known, easy magic trick. If you already know how to perform the "Magnetic Pencil," it's a powerful follow up. After showing that a pencil sticks to your hand as you grasp your wrist, you suddenly let go of your "grabbing" hand and the pencil mysteriously stays in place.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Rubber Pencil
Here's a super easy magic trick that's really an optical illusion. You wave a normal pencil and it appears to bend, just as if it were made of rubber.

Easy Magic Tricks: Butter Knife Through Napkin
Here's a trick that you can do after dinner with just a napkin and a butter knife. You drape a napkin over your hand and a butter knife appears to pass right through the napkin. It's an impromptu effect that requires no gimmicks. You can perform this one with a pencil or pen, but it's traditionally performed with a butter knife.

Easy Magic Tricks: Two-Card Monte
You show two cards and then remove one and place it behind your back. When the spectator guesses the card that you took, he is always wrong.

Easy Magic Tricks: Aces From Your Pocket
You mysteriously locate four aces from a shuffled deck. This one is easy to perform. All you need is a deck of cards and a jacket that has an inner pocket.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Knot Tie Challenge
Here's an easy trick-actually it's more of a challenge. You challenge your friends to tie a knot in a piece of rope, but the catch is, once they grab the rope, they can't let go. Once they give up, you show them how.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Card Prediction
An easy method to predict a card that your spectator is going to select.

Easy Magic Tricks: Disappearing Coin
An easy coin trick that you can perform anytime and anywhere. But you must have a friend to help you.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Clairvoyant Crayons
Using your amazing magical powers, you can always tell what color crayon a spectator hands to you-even though you can't see it. You can perform this one almost anywhere.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Telephone Predictor
In this mathematical mystery, you perform a series of mathematical processes and somehow end-up with your spectator's phone number.

Easy Magic Tricks: A Dicey Book
You somehow predict a word on a randomly selected page in a book.

Easy Magic Tricks: Liar's Lair
With this logic trick, you can guess who is holding what, despite the fact that one person is lying and the other is telling the truth.

Easy Magic Tricks: Standing Card Find
This is a good and easy “find a card” trick that works great in situations where you’re standing and performing for others. There are no complicated moves; you use an ungimmicked, real deck; the conditions seem fair (the spectator examines and shuffles the deck) and your ability to find a card is baffling. All you have to do is add the build-up and presentation.

Easy Magic Tricks: With the Grain
In this easy card trick, you quickly find a card that a spectator has cut to. The spectator can mix the cards and freely cuts the deck to a selected card. The spectator replaces the cut and squares the deck. The deck is not a trick one and you don’t even touch the deck until the revelation at the end.

Easy Magic Tricks: Double the Fun - A Card Location
Here's an easy way to have a spectator select and lose a card and then find it. Compared against the many other secretes that we offer on this site to perform a similar outcome, this one is completely different. The spectator performs much of the handling of the cards, and at the end, there's no trace of the secret.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Card Divination
A series of six cards are laid out on the table. The magician turns away and a spectator silently points to one of the cards to select it. When the magician turns around, another person who acts as an assistant points at the various cards and asks the magician “is this the card?” When the assistant comes to the correct card, the magician identifies it as the chosen card.

Easy Magic Tricks: Vanishing a Coin With Rings
Here’s a great way to vanish a coin. Two rings and a playing card are shown on a table. The rings and playing card are stacked on top of a coin. When a ring and the card are removed, the coin has completely vanished. The rings and card are stacked back onto the coin and removed, and the coin returns. There’s some preparation to perform this one, but it’s visual and ultra-easy to do.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Jumping Rubberband - Version 2
This is an advanced version of the “Jumping Rubberband” trick. This version uses two rubberbands, one that switches places between your fingers and the second that appears to block it. Even though you’ve wrapped a rubberband around the tips of your fingers, a second rubberband quickly and mysteriously jump from your pinkie and ring fingers to the first and middle fingers of the same hand.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Jumping Rubberband 1
A rubberband quickly and mysteriously jumps from your pinkie and ring fingers to the first and middle fingers of the same hand and a second rubberband jumps in the other direction from the first and middle fingers to the pinkie and ring fingers. This is a variation and advanced version of the popular "jumping rubberband."

Easy Magic Tricks: The Jumping Rubberband
A rubber band mysteriously jumps from your pinkie and ring fingers to the first and middle fingers of the same hand and then back again. All you need is a rubberband.

Easy Magic Tricks: Seeing With Your Fingers
Here’s an offbeat easy magic trick that uses coins. You have a spectator randomly select a coin from several that are in a bag or bowl. With a marker, the spectator writes his initials on the coin. The spectator concentrates on the coin for a few seconds and places it with the others inside of the bowl. Without looking, you are able to immediately reach into the bowl and pull out the selected and marked coin.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Deciding Domino
This bit of mentalism uses a set of dominos. Here, you accurately predict a domino that will be left after a certain procedure. Be sure that you have lots of time before you perform this one.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Clipped Card
This effect is more of a puzzle than a magic trick. It's a fun exercise in perception and can act as an introduction to a card trick or an effect where you explain the difference between illusion and reality.

Easy Magic Tricks: The Bill Roll
In this effect you clearly roll two bills together on a table. And when you unroll them, the bills have traded places-the bill that was previously on top is now on the bottom and vice versa. This simple effect is easy to learn and perform. All you need are two bills of different denominations and there are no gimmicks, fancy moves or extra devices.

Easy Magic Tricks: Dark Magic
Here’s a great trick to perform at a party. You ask someone to select an item while you’re out of the room, tell everyone else which item was selected and leave it in place. When you return, another person goes from object to object touching them in a random order. When the person touches the chosen object, you’re able to tell everyone that this is the selected object.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

Explore Magic & Illusion

About.com Special Features

Scrapbook Technique Gallery

Use these ideas to inspire your own uniquely beautiful pages. More >

Price Your Collectibles

Find out how much your treasured collection is worth. More >

  1. Home
  2. Hobbies & Games
  3. Magic & Illusion

©2009 About.com, a part of The New York Times Company.

All rights reserved.