Magnetar Easy 600LB 360 Kit — Worth the Step Up?
The Magnetar Easy 600LB 360 Degree Kit puts a solid double-sided magnet in a beginner-friendly package for $99.99 — a little more than dirt-cheap starter kits, but the build quality backs it up.
The Magnetar Easy 600LB isn't the cheapest way into magnet fishing, but it's probably the smartest one. You're getting a 360-degree design — meaning it pulls from every angle as you drag — which is the kind of thing you'd want to upgrade to anyway if you started with a single-sided budget magnet.
I'd put this in the 'first real kit' category. Not a toy. Not an enthusiast flex either. Just a genuinely decent starting point from a brand that knows what it's doing.
The $99.99 price tag stings a little if you're trying to spend fifty bucks and call it a day — but if you're even remotely serious about this hobby, the gap between a $40 mystery kit and this thing is pretty significant.
When I first got this kit in hand, the weight surprised me — in a good way. There's a solidity to Magnetar's magnets that you just don't feel with the cheaper stuff. You pick it up and it's like, okay, this is a thing that means business. The coating felt even and tight, no rough spots, no weird seams. I've opened kits at this price point that looked like they'd been assembled in a hurry. This wasn't that.
The 360-degree design is the whole point here, and it actually matters.
Here's what I mean by that. A single-sided magnet — the flat disc kind — only pulls from one face. Which is fine if you're dropping straight down from a bridge and dragging the bottom. But the moment you're sweeping sideways through a channel, or dragging along a concrete wall, or trying to snag something that's half-buried on its side, you're leaving a lot of potential finds behind. The 360 design wraps the magnetic field around the whole magnet so it's grabbing no matter what angle it makes contact. I pulled an old bolt cutter out of a stretch of the Susquehanna on a cold November morning — the kind of morning where you're questioning all your choices before 9am — and I'm pretty sure it was a weird lateral contact that got it. Wouldn't have happened with my old single-face disc.
The rope that comes with the kit is genuinely better than the stuff I'd been using before I switched. Beefy, doesn't kink up in the cold, knots hold. I've had kit ropes that started fraying after two outings. This one's held up through a lot of muddy afternoons without complaint.
That said — the carabiner. It's fine. Just fine.
I wouldn't trust it forever. It does the job it needs to do out of the box, but if you're fishing off a high bridge or getting into heavier targets, swap it for something beefier before too long. It's not a dealbreaker, it's just the one component where you can tell they made a budget decision. Everything else in the kit feels like it was thought about. The carabiner feels like it was included because something had to be.
Who's this actually for? I'd tell someone buying a first real kit to look hard at this. Not if you're purely experimenting — a $40 single-side might be a smarter test. But if you watched someone pull a safe out of the water on YouTube and you're already thinking about where your nearest creek is, just start here. The 360-degree design isn't a gimmick and Magnetar's quality control is consistent enough that you're not rolling the dice on whether the threading holds.
I wouldn't steer a kid away from it either — especially if there's an adult in the loop. The setup is straightforward, nothing overly complicated about getting started, and 600 lbs of pull force is enough to make every outing feel like there's a real chance of something good. Which, honestly, is most of what this hobby is about.
Would I buy it again? Yeah. Already recommended it to two people.
