Preston Lyford

Lyford placed a deck of cards in my hands and told me to hold them still.

He used my phone to take a picture of me and my handful of cards and handed the phone back to me. When I held the cards, it seemed as though half of the deck faced him, and the other half faced me. However, the photo on my phone showed only a single card facing towards Lyford – the ten of hearts, the very same card I had selected, without any influence from the deck moments before.

Lyford, from Kalamazoo, adapted the trick himself from a similar act. He’s appeared on “America’s Got Talent,” “West Michigan’s Got Talent” and is slated to appear on the next season of “Penn & Teller: Fool Us” – a TV show for aspiring magicians to try their best acts in front of the famous comedy-magic duo.

But his beginnings as a magician were much more modest, he said. It all started at 10 years old when he received a deck of cards as a gift during a family vacation to Lake Tahoe. Lyford thought it would be more interesting to teach himself a magic trick than a card game. He laughed while recalling the memory.

“I went upstairs and I showed it to my parents and my grandparents, and they were like 'Wow, very cool,' sarcastically,” Lyford said.

But Lyford was undeterred. He liked the idea of performing, of showing people something unexpected and about a year or two later, he received a call for his first performance: a six-hour, outdoor act at a festival for elementary school kids.

“That led to me knowing that yes, I can do this, professionally, and get paid,” Lyford said.

After performing birthday parties, corporate events, fundraisers and festivals in Kalamazoo, Lyford does consider himself a professional. He said after eight years of work, he feels he can call himself a magician rather than someone who performs magic.

“A painter needs that experience to earn the title of painter,” Lyford said. “Those couple years, he just paints … running into those experiences, the heckling, the messing up.”

Lyford described one of these hardships: When he competed in “West Michigan’s Got Talent,” he caught an adult competitor tampering with some of his preset materials backstage.

Despite some setbacks, his dedication led him to Season 16 of “America’s Got Talent” where he was able to advance to a second performance. He got cut after that, but still managed to improve his act and receive some strong praise in the process.

“They spend a lot of time with you beforehand and they really help you with your act and what you're going to say when you go out there,” Lyford said. “It was really, really nice to hear from Simon that I shouldn't even go to college, I should go straight out to Vegas.”

But Lyford is not drawn to magic for the money. He does it to bring joy to others and for his love of performing a scripted, engaging show as a self-described introvert.

A part of him comes alive when he’s performing. It’s like putting on a mask and becoming a different person, like watching a different version of himself perform onstage. 

His stage persona is charismatic, funny and engaging. His performance of the trick involving my phone and the deck of cards was smooth and well-rehearsed and he misdirected us with jokes before finally revealing the final result.

Lyford said his friends and family have noted this transformation. It led him to study acting, a vocation he might choose to make a career out of someday.

Besides the way performance makes him feel about himself, one of Lyford’s biggest draws to the world of magic comes from something he experienced years ago at his first performance: a festival for elementary schoolers. 

Lyford gave a deck of cards to a young student who was “mind-blown” by his tricks.

At the end of the festival, a teacher approached him in tears.

“She said that the kid that I gave the deck to has been having a very hard time at home, and he's not super social at school,” Lyford said. “But he ran into that classroom … and said, ‘This is how magicians did it. This is how I'm gonna do it.’ And he was lit up … I guess you could say that was the magic that I’ve been creating.”

When he appears on “Penn & Teller,” Lyford will debut an original act he’s been experimenting with for four years called “Insomnia.” The act involves a series of increasingly complicated shapes displayed in the shadow of a bright light, using a sleight of hand. He came up with the idea while doing homework late one night. True to the act’s name, he only works on it between the hours of 3 and 5 a.m. Early versions of the act can be found on Lyford’s Instagram.

Now, ahead of his upcoming TV appearance, Lyford will focus on bringing his magic to East Lansing – he’s already starting to book some gigs.

Connor Croft

Croft showed me a deck of cards in front of me, spread out and shuffled – but there wasn’t. The table was empty.

Then, he asked us to pick a card. Our photographer pretended to select a card from the invisible deck, “showed” it to me and placed it back on the table. 

Croft asked what card she selected from the pile. She told him it was a seven of spades, and he reached into his pocket, pulled out a real deck of cards and spread them across the table. Only one of the 54 cards was facedown.

Croft flipped it over. It was the seven of spades.

Croft doesn’t see himself making a career out of magic, although he said he probably could if he wanted to, but his pursuit of perfection is the mark of a true professional.

When Croft was 10 years old, he attended Sandy Hill summer camp in Maryland, where he took a magic class. 

“I loved it so much, every single year, I went back, and I did magic there,” Croft said.

The camp got him started, but his desire to improve and perform in front of others kept him going. Croft said he’s not a big stage person – he likes intimate, close-up tricks for a small audience.

“I went on a trip to Europe and I would go around cities saying ‘Hey, want to see a trick?’” Croft said. “If they said yes, I would try and do it for them and try to spark some joy in their lives.”

He’s performed at some birthday parties, but prefers not to be paid; the fun of it and the impact on the kids is enough, he said.

While some might question why a statistics and political theory student would find so much joy in the art of magic, Croft sees his analytical mind as an advantage.

“If you take the word magic trick, you break it down, you have magic and you have trick,” Croft said. “The trick is what I’m doing to fool you … The magic is the storytelling, it's what I call the pizzaz …That magic part is really where the creativity comes in, but the analytical part is perfect for the trick.”

Croft doesn't typically employ much whimsy. He likes to talk his audience through what he’s doing in a logical way without revealing too much. But he excels at the trick, the part of his act that requires working toward a desired effect, the analysis that leads him to observe his audience member’s faces each time he performs, trying to discern what works and what doesn’t.

He’s performed some of his tricks thousands of times, watching, observing or trying to gain an objective understanding of which jokes land and which tricks work the absolute best. He talked quickly and passionately when discussing this relentless approach to bettering his act.

“Shoutout to my parents on that one because they’ve seen the mess of a trick,” Croft said. “As I try and refine it, they’ve seen the same trick tens of times before I show it to a single person.” And even then, he watches the reaction of every person he performs it for. 

This dedication to refinement is all in pursuit of one goal: pleasing his audience.

“I do want to get better, but I want to get better for the people,” Croft said. "I want to get better so other people have a better trick to see and have a better impact on their lives.”

When creating a trick, Croft said he works in reverse, beginning with the final effect of the trick and moving backward to a logical starting point.

He wants to find a career in statistical analysis, so it adds up that one of the tricks he performed after his interview included correctly selecting a series of numbered cards that corresponded to the answer to a math problem we supplied numbers for. 

For the past two years, Croft has worked as a counselor and lead magician at Sandy Hill, the place that got him started. One of the highlights in his experience as a magician came last summer, when a returning camper told Croft that he had become invested in magic since the previous summer, and had held his first show recently.

“It was just so crazy that my teaching had an impact on that kid, that he went and did his own first show,” Croft said.

Now, the young magicians Croft is teaching give him another reason for his endless chase for improvement. He wants to keep working at it so he has better tricks for the kids and can leave a bigger impact on them.