Magic supplies in Escondido, San Diego County, California

Trick decks do the heavy lifting while you learn: a Svengali deck forces a card without a single sleight, a marked deck tells you what they took, and a stripper deck lets you find it blind. Most working repertoires are still mostly cards, and most of them start here.

The quietest magic and often the strongest. Forcing dice, a dice box that reads what is shaken inside it, brass mental dice and PK rings let you know a thought, a number or a word without ever touching a deck. It plays to adults, it plays in corporate rooms, and it leaves no prop to blame.

Beginners usually buy too much. One self-working deck, one coin gimmick and one routine you can perform without thinking is worth more than a shelf of props you half know. The decks under $15 are not the cheap option — they are what most professionals learned on.

The short answer is by post, and that is not a sales pitch — there is no magic shop left in most American cities. The few that survive are in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York. What is left locally is the party-supply aisle and the fancy-dress rack, which sell plastic props to children and nothing you would perform twice. Ordering is simply how magic is bought now, in Escondido as everywhere else.

The west coast magic scene leans close-up and comedy, and Los Angeles has the Magic Castle pulling performers through it. Expect strong local competition and a correspondingly good standard of amateur work.

We post to Escondido like anywhere else in the country. That covers all of San Diego County. Orders over $75 ship free to Escondido, as anywhere else.