Seven magicians walked onto the America’s Got Talent stage in a single season, and each one found a different way to make four judges and a studio audience forget where they were. One knew before he stepped on stage that Simon Cowell would pick the four of diamonds. Another hacked a judge’s phone in real time. A third rebuilt a Queen song from nothing but silence and a loop pedal. What they share is a refusal to let the audience look away.
The Kid from Heartland
He walked up to Simon with a deck of cards and a marker, and the first thing he did was ask Simon to name a card. “Four of diamonds,” Simon said. The magician smiled. “Before I walked on stage, Simon, I knew you were gonna pick the four of diamonds.” He didn’t reach into the deck. He just held up the card he’d been carrying in his hand the whole time. Four of diamonds.
Then he made it personal. He handed Simon the rest of the deck to shuffle, asked him to write down a word that inspired him, and Simon wrote “myself.” The magician used that word, that card, and the shuffled deck to tell his own story. He grew up in Heartland, Wisconsin. His father, Steve, showed him magic when he was five. At ten, he watched Matt Franco win AGT season nine and take home a million dollars. At thirteen, he was in the audience at Franco’s Vegas residency, and Franco pulled him on stage to experience a close-up trick. “From that moment on, I’ve been hooked,” he told the judges. Every card in the deck mapped to a chapter of that life, and the audience watched a small-town kid’s story unfold one flip at a time.
Breaking the Phone
The second act went digital. A female magician had Howie Mandel pass his phone to a volunteer named Sofia, then asked Howie to focus on his passcode. “I will attempt to break through and unlock it,” she said. She did. No magnets, no threads, just a pair of glasses held in Mel B’s palm while she slid a finger upward across the screen.
Then she went further. She accessed Howie’s phone AI assistant and gave it a three-word command. While Howie typed a sentence into the app, she asked every person in a row of the audience to think of a positive word. They called them out one by one: Many, Achievement, Start, Through, Endurance, Resilience, Manifest, Inspirational, Inspiration, Nurture, Dreams. The AI generated a sentence that contained every single one. “Many achievements start through endurance and resilience, manifest inspiration, and nurture dreams.” She read it back, and the audience went quiet. The initials of those words spelled her name.
The Cube and the Corner
One magician made a Rubik’s cube the center of gravity for a two-part trick. He mixed it, asked Mel B if it was still scrambled on all six sides, and got a yes. He turned it once. Still mixed. Then he threw it straight up in the air. “If you actually blink, you’re gonna miss it,” he warned. It came down solved. “Less than a millisecond,” he said, and Mel B’s reaction was a flat, disbelieving “What do you do with that? That’s ridiculous.”
He didn’t stop there. He handed the solved cube to Reba McEntire and told her to guard it. Then he pulled Heidi Klum aside for a card trick. Heidi picked the six of diamonds from a freshly shuffled deck. The magician tore a tiny corner off the card, made it vanish from his hand, and claimed it was now inside the Rubik’s cube in Reba’s palm. Reba lifted the cube. No corner. “No,” she said. “That would’ve been awesome.” He went one better. He broke a corner off the cube itself, unfolded it, and there was the six of diamonds, folded into the plastic.
Building a Song from Silence
The most layered act in the lineup treated music and magic as the same discipline. The magician opened with a line that stuck: “Music doesn’t start with sound. It starts with silence.” He had the judges each pick a playing card face down, then used a watch dial to create a time. KSI turned the dial, Amanda named a number between one and twelve (nine), Alicia named a number between one and sixty (forty-seven). “We just created a time,” he said. “9:47. No, we did.” They added the numbers, got 56, and Simon scrolled to song number 56 on a list of his hundred favorite tracks. He knew the song. He didn’t say it.
Then the magician built that song from scratch using three loop pedals. First the beat. Simon closed his eyes and focused on the drums. The magician recorded a drum loop. Then the bass. Then the melody, with Amanda humming along to help him lock in the notes. Layer by layer, the song assembled itself in the studio. “Don’t Stop Me Now,” Simon finally said. Queen. The judges turned over their cards. They spelled Q-U-E-E-N.
The Phones in the Air
One magician wanted to do “something that’s never been done before.” He asked the entire audience to pull out their phones and hold them up. A wave of screens lit the studio. Some of the phones turned red. He had Simon pick three red phones from the crowd and bring their owners on stage. He asked one of them, Tara, to open her calculator and guess how many number-one selling artists Simon Cowell had on his record label. She typed 53. He then asked the audience to guess how many records the Spice Girls sold. The numbers started stacking, and the magician used them to build toward a reveal that tied the audience’s collective guesses to a specific, pre-arranged outcome.
Another act had a volunteer close her eyes and hit seven random numbers on a phone. The result: 73,000,928,547. “Does this mean anything to you?” he asked. The answer, delivered with a pause that let the number land, confirmed it did.
What They All Did Right
Seven different approaches, one common thread: each magician made the audience a participant rather than a spectator. The Wisconsin kid needed Simon’s card and his word. The phone-hacker needed Howie’s passcode and a row of strangers’ vocabulary. The musician needed four judges to pick cards, turn a watch dial, and hum a melody. The cube trick needed Reba to hold the cube and Heidi to pick a card. None of these acts would work in a vacuum. They required the specific people on that stage, in that moment, to do exactly what they were told. That dependency is what made the reveals land. The audience wasn’t watching a trick happen to someone. They were watching a trick happen because of them.
Watch the full video and you’ll see all seven acts in sequence, each one escalating the last. The card story, the phone hack, the cube, the song, the phones in the air, the seven-digit number. They don’t just show off dexterity. They show what happens when a magician treats the audience as co-authors instead of witnesses.