What's Trending in Magic?

New feature

Every week, dozens of new tricks are released, reviews are published, and newsletters introduce products that deserve attention. Keeping track of everything happening in the magic community isn't easy—and simply sorting by "newest" doesn't always tell you what's actually creating buzz.

That's why I built Trending Now.

Instead of showing what's new, Trending Now shows what's gaining momentum across the magic community over the last 14 days. It brings together multiple signals to highlight the products, creators, and themes that people are actually talking about right now.

How It Works

Trending Now analyzes content that MagicPulse has already indexed. Currently, it uses three primary sources:

• New magic releases
• Product reviews
• Published external newsletters

The analysis runs on a rolling 14-day window, meaning trends naturally evolve as new content appears and older discussions fade away.

Finding Trending Products

The same product often appears in several places. It may be released by multiple dealers, reviewed by different creators, and mentioned in one or more newsletters.

Rather than treating each mention as something separate, MagicPulse groups them together whenever they appear to refer to the same product.

From there, a trend score is calculated using several factors, including:

• How many times the product appears
• How recent the activity is
• How widely it's being discussed across different sources

This creates a much better picture of what's genuinely attracting attention than simply listing the latest releases.

Discovering Trending Creators

Trending Now also identifies creators who are receiving attention.

Creator names are extracted conservatively from titles and content using patterns like "by..." or "with...". At the same time, well-known dealers and shops are filtered out so businesses like Murphy's Magic aren't mistakenly identified as creators.

The goal is simple: highlight the people who are currently driving conversations in the magic community.

Using AI to Find Themes

Artificial intelligence plays an important role—but probably not in the way you might expect.

The AI doesn't search the web and doesn't generate trends from outside information.

Instead, it only analyzes content that MagicPulse has already indexed. Its job is to identify broader themes that connect multiple pieces of content, such as coin magic, custom playing cards, or mentalism.

To keep the results trustworthy, every suggested theme must be backed by actual evidence found in the indexed data. The AI isn't allowed to invent topics or introduce information that isn't already there.

Fast by Design

Although the analysis is quite sophisticated, the Trending page loads almost instantly.

That's because the results are generated in advance and stored as a database snapshot. When the analysis is refreshed through scheduled jobs, a new snapshot replaces the old one, so visitors never have to wait while everything is recalculated.

No AI-Generated Images

The images you see on Trending Now are not created by AI.

Whenever possible, MagicPulse reuses thumbnails that already exist for indexed releases and reviews. If an image can't be confidently matched to a trend, no image is shown. Accuracy is always more important than filling empty space.

Why I Built It

One question has always fascinated me:

What's actually trending in magic right now?

Not just what's new.

Not just what's being promoted.

But what the community is genuinely paying attention to.

Trending Now is my attempt to answer that question using data instead of opinions. As MagicPulse continues to index more of the magic world, these insights will become even more useful for performers, creators, collectors, dealers, and anyone who wants to stay connected with what's happening in magic.

I hope you'll find it as useful as I do.