Best Levitation Magic Tricks: A Guide for People Who Watched Dynamo Once and Never Recovered

I have been asked to write about levitation. I would like it noted, for the record, that I find this beneath me.

Levitation. Of course. Because apparently we have not collectively done enough damage with this particular effect. Ever since a certain someone floated above the Thames on television, an entire generation of magicians decided that making things hover was not just an effect but a personality trait. I have spent the better part of twenty years watching people wave their hands over borrowed rings while a thread they attached incorrectly pings into a stranger's glass of Pinot Grigio. It is not magic. It is optimism in the face of inadequate preparation, and the rest of us are tired of watching it.

And yet. And yet. The equipment has got rather good. Irritatingly good, actually. Good enough that I have been forced, against my better judgement and several of my principles, to sit down and tell you which levitation devices are actually worth purchasing in 2026. I have done this. Here is the result. Try not to make me regret it more than I already do.

Surya's Device Pro by Surya Kumar

Thirty-nine pounds. I looked at this price and immediately assumed the worst. I have been doing this long enough to know that cheap levitation devices are usually cheap for a reason, and that reason is usually that they do not work, or that they work twice and then disintegrate in your jacket pocket during a corporate event in Slough. So I am somewhat annoyed to report that Surya's Device Pro is actually clever. It is a self-contained ITR with no external anchor point, which solves the single most tedious problem in invisible thread work: needing to hook something to something else before you can perform. You wear the device. You are ready. That is the whole thing.

All the routines use borrowed props. You start clean, you end clean, there is no reset, and the audience can examine the props before and after. A haunted pack routine, a floating bill, a flying ring, linking rubber bands. None of it requires the kind of advance preparation that makes impromptu performance impossible. It is not indestructible. Treat it roughly and it will let you know about it in front of someone important. But at this price, if you treat it with basic respect, it will do exactly what it says. I have run out of reasons to dismiss it, which is not a sentence I write often.

View on Monster Magic

If you are new to all of this, start here and not somewhere more expensive. You will thank me. You probably will not thank me, actually. You will buy it, snap the thread, and go online to complain. But you should start here.

Mini e-ITR by K.Pen and TCC Magic

This sold out at the Blackpool Magic Convention on the first day of 2025. On the first day. I would like to say this surprises me, but magicians at Blackpool will queue for forty-five minutes and spend money they do not have on anything with a product video that looks vaguely impressive at nine in the morning on four hours of sleep. So the sell-out alone proves nothing. What does prove something is that it is, in fact, extremely good, and I resent having to say that about something called the Mini e-ITR. It is 2.8 centimetres by 2.8 centimetres. It fits inside a wristband. It fits under a watch. It is small enough to be hidden somewhere nobody would think to look for a motorised thread reel, because the correct number of people looking for motorised thread reels in those locations is zero.

It performs every classic ITR effect: levitation, animation, balance, rising card, haunted deck, invisible touch, dancing paper balls. The polyethylene thread is more resilient than standard nylon. It is hands-free once set up. Some early production units had quality control problems, which I am mentioning because pretending otherwise helps nobody and I am not in the business of helping manufacturers pretend their early batches were fine when they were not. Later units appear to have addressed this. At fifty-six pounds for something this compact and this capable, I am prepared to recommend it, through gritted teeth, with the firm stipulation that you actually practise before inflicting it on an audience.

View on Monster Magic

Pick this over Surya's Device Pro if you have some thread experience already and want something that does more. Pick Surya's if you are not sure what your thread experience actually is, which is most of you.

Tempo Elf by Mental Tom

The world's smallest remote-controlled thread reel. It fits inside a bottle cap. A bottle cap. I do not know what to do with this information other than pass it along and hope you appreciate how profoundly strange it is that this exists. The unit is 18 millimetres by 18 millimetres. The motor is completely silent, silent enough that you can hide it inside a bottle cap placed on a spectator's hand and they will feel nothing whatsoever while it operates. You stand up to five metres away with a remote and two programming modes and you make things happen that the spectator cannot account for because they are too busy staring at a bottle cap that appears to have developed opinions. This is either the cleverest thing I have seen in levitation for years or it is the most elaborately unkind thing that has ever been done to a stranger. Possibly both.

Battery life is forty minutes standby and twenty minutes continuous use. The thread breakage rate has been reduced by ninety percent compared to traditional ITRs through engineering I am not going to pretend I fully understand. It charges via USB-C. Mental Tom, whoever Mental Tom is, has made something I object to on principle and cannot fault in practice. That is the most irritating kind of product to review and I would like him to know that.

View on Monster Magic

Buy this if you want to do effects where you are visibly nowhere near the object that is moving. That is a very different thing from close-up levitation and it is considerably harder for an audience to explain. It annoys me that it works this well.

Leviosa (Red) by Joao Miranda

A hundred and fifty-seven pounds. For a deck of cards. I am going to need a moment. Right. A card is chosen, signed, returned to the deck. Then, without any suspicious movement from the performer, without any suspicious movement from anyone at all, the deck cuts itself in half and the signed card shoots out. And then, because apparently that was not enough, the entire deck rises off the floor and soars through the air into the performer's waiting hand. The gimmick is completely self-contained within the cards. The setup is done in front of the audience. There is no cleanup. It resets by itself. You push a button and the whole thing just happens. Craig Petty, who has seen more magic than almost anyone alive, said it was one of the best things he had ever seen. I find Craig Petty's endorsement both completely credible and extremely inconvenient right now.

It comes ready to use out of the box. Includes a spare thread spool. Can be performed multiple times in the same set. Button-activated, largely handles itself, requires approximately no skill to trigger. This is the kind of thing I would normally hold against a product on principle. I am choosing not to, because what the audience experiences when this is performed correctly is so far beyond anything they can account for that I cannot in good conscience tell you not to buy it. Which I hate. But there it is.

View on Monster Magic

I started writing this convinced I would spend most of it explaining why levitation is an overhyped category full of expensive devices that end up in drawers. Most of it is. Most people who buy levitation equipment do not practise with it, do not think about angles, do not think about lighting, and then perform it badly at someone who deserved better and wonder why the reaction was underwhelming. I have watched this happen for twenty years and I expect to watch it for twenty more.

But these four are the ones that actually work, for the performer who is prepared to put in what is required. I am recommending them. In writing. I will not be doing it again.