LOVIMAG Neodymium Disc Magnets — Good Enough to Start

My neighbor's kid got into magnet fishing after watching about forty-seven TikToks in a row one Sunday afternoon. His parents texted me asking what to get him. I said get this one. Not because it's the best magnet on the market — it's not — but because spending $15.99 to find out if a twelve-year-old is actually going to keep doing this is the correct financial decision.

That's basically the whole pitch for the LOVIMAG disc magnet, and I don't think that's a bad thing at all.

I took one of these out to a spot I like on a slow-moving section of river near me — kind of a nothing spot, honestly, an old bridge where people have been chucking stuff off the side probably since before I was born. First cast I pulled up a handful of old bottle caps and a chunk of rebar that had been down there long enough to be its own small ecosystem of rust. Nothing dramatic, but the magnet did exactly what a magnet is supposed to do.

The pull force is real. I'm not going to pretend it's going to yank up a cast iron tractor part from six feet of silt — it won't — but for normal surface-level stuff, coins, small tools, the kind of junk that accumulates in a few feet of murky water, it grabs it. I didn't have it slip or release unexpectedly, which is more than I can say for some cheapo disc magnets I've messed around with before.

The BSR ranking on this thing is actually kind of telling. Products that get bought and immediately returned in frustration sink fast. This one's sitting high, which means people are opening it, using it, and not coming back angry. That's not nothing for a $15 magnet.

What's not great: it's bare bones. No rope, no case, no knot guide, nothing. You're getting a magnet. So if you're handing this to someone who's completely new, remind them they also need rope — paracord works fine to start — and they should know at least a basic knot before they throw it in a river and watch it disappear.

The disc form factor also means you're getting a single-sided pull. Nothing wrong with that for casual use, but if you end up sticking with this hobby and want to work along the sides of walls or underneath things, you'll eventually want a double-sided or threaded eye magnet with a bit more pull. This is a first step, not a forever magnet.

But here's the thing — it's $15.99. I keep coming back to that because it genuinely matters. You can try magnet fishing for the price of a mediocre fast food meal. If you go out twice and realize you love it, great, now you know what to upgrade to. If you go out once and leave the magnet in a drawer forever, you lost sixteen dollars. The math is just really forgiving on this one.

I'd buy it again without really thinking about it.