When I was starting to write my Happy New Year 2026 post, I included a part that mentioned "I spent a lot less on magic this year.", but I thought about it and I don't think that's entirely true, though it does feel like it on a higher level.
This post is less to put a dollar amount to things and more to see, for myself, whether I've been careless with my "budget for magic" during 2025. Let's find out together, shall we?
Subscriptions
I'm going to start out with listing the subscriptions I have; they seem to be the easiest to enumerate off the top of my head and I will say the most about them, individually.
Vanishing Inc., Masterclass
Coming in at $50 per month, this gets me access to the monthly Masterclass lectures, plus the "VI Studio" to stream a bunch of other videos on demand. It used to give free shipping on all orders too, but now that's available for all customers if I recall correctly.
While it's been great, I don't think it's entirely worth it for me anymore. I'm currently watching Ryan Plunkett's Masterclass, which is from 2023. I haven't gotten to any of the ones from 2024 or 2025 yet...
Genii Magazine
I always buy the 3-year subscription to Genii, both physical and digital, and I technically bought it in 2024 so it doesn't really count against my 2025 budget. It's $159 total though, so if we wanted to break it down annually for the sake of argument, that's a solid $53 for 12 issues of the magazine.
I'll be writing another post or two about Genii coming up soon, but I'll leave it as "this one's not going anywhere!"
One Ahead
I started subscribing to the digital newsletter "One Ahead" back in 2023. It was a Black Friday special, $52 and it came with a physical book. I must have blinked and missed 2024's renewal, because when I got the receipt for the 2025 renewal coming in at $100, whoa.
This one's going to be on the chopping block for me; I've found no use from it. I know I said "digital newsletter", but that's only because their blog posts get sent out in an email (e.g., "digital newsletter") too. The posts are hit-or-miss useful for me as a hobbyist magician, and the things I catch the most are calls to upgrade my membership or pay more for this year's book, etc.
I'm all for supporting other magicians, but in a world where my free time is in the negatives, this one's too expensive to make the cut.
The Jerx
I'm a supporter of The Jerx, at the R.U.M. level, and I don't see that status changing anytime soon (at least, not by me). Though his writing style is not super welcoming to younger magicians, I'm not a younger magician so it kind of works out for me =P
Tricks
The "Tricks" category includes individual "tricks", which could be a video tutorial only, or something like Ties (which I bought five 10 packs of). I was going through my online orders, since I didn't visit a physical magic shop throughout the year, and I was happy because I didn't really buy a ton. I picked up: Ties, H20 (video tutorial only), Seeing Stones, Rope + Professor's Nightmare (tutorial), Notion of Motion, Cryptext 2.5, and One Coin Routine (by Azim Guliyev).
These online purchases came up to a whopping $288. I was happy with this! Until... I remembered I also attended FISM and visited the many, many booths they had. I'll enumerate the tricks I picked up there in a separate post, but those came in at a total of around $300 too. So, yeah.
Books + Videos
Any type of book, booklet, lecture notes, or video (that teaches more than one trick) fall into this section. I... well, these all came in at around $1,100 for the year 😱
I did get some pretty decent deals on books and picked up 24 books in total -- all physical, no "e-books". The biggest chunk of change was for Marlo's Magazines and 6 (by Dani DaOrtiz). The former were 6 very large volumes, the latter was one very tiny book. Almost a booklet, if it didn't have a hard cover.
Decks
Normally, yeesh. Normally I spend way too much on decks of playing cards. My goal is to always use them, and I rarely do. I go through one or two decks a week and yet my collection has always grown at a faster pace than that, so I legit have a few thousand just sitting and collecting dust. This past year though, I cut back substantially! I spent just over $200 on decks, and those were for Mystery Decks by both Art of Play and Dan & Dave -- two separate orders. The latter has arrived already, very shortly after ordering. The ones from Art of Play though, I've been waiting a few weeks for them and they're still not here!
Now, to caveat the above... on Kickstarter I backed 6 different campaigns for decks of playing cards. These came in a total less than about $500. None of these are decks that I'd use for magic though, they were purely art based and to help support the creators. Since they are playing cards, I feel like I should mention them here and include them in the budget.
FISM
As mentioned above, I went to FISM! I'll be writing all about that trip separately, but let's throw a rough ballpark cost for the FISM ticket, flight, and Airbnb at about $2500. I'll omit food, and the actual goodies I purchased were included above already. I would say that it was more expensive because it was hosted in Italy, but that's similar pricing to anywhere in the U.S. too.
Putting it Altogether
If we exclude FISM, but not the things I bought from there, the total I spent on "magic" in 2025 comes in around $3,441. It's closer to $6k if I lump in FISM's costs -- but let's pretend that attending conventions is magically free =P
Again, ignoring FISM because that was a thought-out and predetermined cost, over $3400 in a year is... well, a lot. Honestly, it's more than I thought I spent this past year. I was trying to cut back a bit, especially on decks. Why "cut back"? Not because I'm losing interest -- not in the slightest, I still read (or watch) nearly everyday and I do practice every day. But, my library is already overflowed and I have more videos that I'll ever be able to watch. Buying more, in a sense, takes away from what I have.
I'm getting a puppy in a week or so from now. I only mention that because, if you're not aware, taking care of a puppy is a lot of work during the first month or two. Magifest is at the end of January, so I won't be attending this year... because of the puppy. I also don't attend the summer conferences (normally in Vegas), so we can assume conventions are out of the equation this year. Though, I've been keeping my eye on TRICS (held in North Carolina in November). We'll see!
I always say I'll cut back on Kickstarter campaigns, but every once in a while something really nice catches my eye. Only time will tell there.
And as for books... well, it's the first week of the year and I already spent close to $300 on a handful on eBay. Yay me!