Magic supplies in Surprise, Maricopa County, Arizona

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.

Nobody needs an expensive prop to start. The strongest beginner material in the shop costs less than lunch — self-working decks, sponge balls and forcing dice — and all of it still gets used by people who have been performing for twenty years.

Magic shops closed almost everywhere between 2000 and 2015, Surprise included, and the trade moved online. The gain is range — a marked deck, a chop cup and a set of linking rings in one order. The cost is that you cannot handle anything first, so the listings are written to be read instead: what ships, what it does, what it takes to do it.

Las Vegas anchors the southwest, which means the regional standard for stage illusion is unusually high and there is steady paid work for close-up performers in restaurants and casinos.

We post to Surprise like anywhere else in the country. That covers all of Maricopa County. Free shipping over $75 anywhere in the United States, Surprise included.