Magnetar Savage Package Barbarian 3500lb — The Real Deal?

The weight hits you first. I pulled the Barbarian out and just held it for a second — it's dense in a way that doesn't feel like it's trying to impress you, it just feels like a thing that was built to do a job. Magnetar makes only magnet fishing gear. Not camping stuff, not garage storage solutions, not random outdoor equipment. Just this. And you can tell.

The 360° allround design is the part I want to talk about most.

I fished a stretch of the Fox River last fall — murky, current moving faster than it looked, the kind of spot where you're dragging more than dropping — and the allround pull made a genuinely noticeable difference. I've used single-sided magnets for years and the directional game you play trying to orient your pass gets old. With this thing you're not babying the angle. You drag, the magnet grips whatever it grips, and you find out what's down there. We pulled up a chunk of cast iron that I'm pretty sure had been sitting in that riverbed since sometime in the mid-1980s based on the rust alone — or possibly longer, honestly, it was in rough shape.

3500 pounds of pull force sounds like marketing until you feel something grab and not let go. I had a moment where I thought I'd snagged the bottom permanently — rope going taut, nothing moving — and then whatever it was came loose all at once. Heavy. A folded piece of thick plate steel, maybe 18 inches across. The magnet held it clean. No slipping, no drama.

The rope and gloves that come with this package are actually good. That's not always the case with kits.

Usually when a kit includes gloves I expect something thin and useless that I'll throw in my bag and forget about. These I've actually kept using. They're not fancy but they do the thing — grip when your hands are wet, which is basically always. The rope has the right stiffness to it, doesn't coil weird, knots hold without having to double up and pray. Someone at Magnetar has clearly used this gear in real conditions and not just assembled a box of parts to hit a price point.

Here's the honest part though. Four hundred dollars is four hundred dollars. If you're two or three outings into magnet fishing and you're still figuring out how to work a spot, this is too much magnet for where you are right now. Not because it's complicated — it's not — but because you won't know what it's actually doing for you yet. This is for someone who's already got opinions about pull force, who's already lost a cheaper magnet to a snag and learned something from it, who fishes spots that require the kind of commitment a magnet like this represents.

If that's you, yeah. You already know you want this.

I wouldn't hand this to a beginner and I wouldn't buy it as a casual upgrade from a mid-range kit. But if you're fishing hard spots regularly and you've been piecing together your own setup from different brands trying to get to something like this — Magnetar just built the thing you were trying to build yourself.