Crappie Magnet Kit Honest Review: What Works, What Doesn't, Who Should Skip It

I am going to tell you the things about the Crappie Magnet Best of the Best Kit that nobody puts in the listing photos. Not because the kit is bad. Because I have had it in a tackle box since the first week of March, and eight months of actual use teaches you things a product page never will.

Our family fishes from the bank and the public piers around Ross Barnett Reservoir, and sometimes the little farm pond my aunt owns. Bluegill mostly, crappie when they are cooperative, catfish when the kids get bored. The kit came home with me because Callie, who is eleven, wanted to rig her own jigs instead of asking me to do it, and because the loose jig heads rolling around the back of the Tahoe had gotten out of hand. What follows is the honest version: the good, the annoying, and the part where I tell you to buy something else entirely.

What This Kit Actually Is, Minus the Marketing

The Crappie Magnet Best of the Best Kit is 115 pieces of small-profile crappie tackle. The listing says it includes the top Crappie Magnet body colors, Double Cross jig heads and E-Z Crappie Floats. The bodies are split tail plastics, and the whole design idea is that the split tail stays open in the water and does the work while the body itself moves very little.

That last part is worth understanding before you spend anything, because it is the opposite of how most soft plastics get sold. Curly tail grubs and skirted jigs wiggle hard on the retrieve. This one does not. It hangs there with its tail splayed open and lets the fish decide. On a slow vertical presentation off a pier, that is exactly what you want. If you are the kind of angler who needs to feel a lure thumping, you will think this thing is broken.

The listing gives the item dimensions as 2.5 by 0.25 by 0.5 inches and a set weight of 4.54 grams, and the materials are high carbon steel for the hooks and plastic for the bodies. Hold a ruler up against your own hand and those numbers tell you more than any product photo will. The hooks are a J hook with a spear point. There is no scent, no rattle, no bead inside, no glitter finish to any of it. I have bought tackle that promised all three and fished no better than this does on a plain split tail.

The pieces themselves are small. The jig heads run a few tenths of a gram, the bodies are under two inches, and the whole set is built for fish that measure in inches, not pounds. That is not a flaw. It is the entire point. It just means you should know what you are buying before the box arrives.

What Surprised Me After Eight Months

The bodies hold up better than I expected. I figured we would shred through the plastics in a month, the way kids fish. Instead, the split tail design means the hook goes through a fairly stout section of plastic, and the bodies survive multiple fish and multiple snags before they start tearing at the collar. I have thrown away maybe a dozen since March, and most of those were lost to brush piles, not to wear.

Second surprise: the floats are not an afterthought. I assumed the E-Z Crappie Floats in the kit were filler to get the piece count up. They are not. Ben, who is nine, fishes a bobber and a worm and is only now learning to watch a line instead of a float. Having small floats sized for these jigs meant he could fish the crappie rigs the same way he fishes everything else, and that kept him interested on a night when the bite was slow.

Third: the jig heads are the real anchor of the kit. High carbon steel hooks with a spear point, and they have not bent out on me once, including on a couple of bluegill that were far too big for their own good. I have straightened cheaper jig hooks with my fingers. These I have not.

The kit solved the exact problem I bought it for: Callie rigs her own jigs now, and there are no loose hooks rolling around the back of my Tahoe.

The Parts Nobody Warns You About

Here is where I earn my keep. The pieces are tiny. I mean genuinely small, small enough that a nine-year-old's fingers struggle with the jig head eyelet and small enough that I have watched a body disappear into the gap between pier planks and never be seen again. If you have kids under about ten, plan on doing the rigging. Ben still hands me his.

Here is the specific picture so you know what I mean. A Saturday morning in late April, wind coming across the reservoir hard enough to push a bobber sideways, and I set the kit's own box down on the pier bench and opened it. One gust slid half the loose bodies into the hinge corner. We spent five minutes with the tips of our fingers digging tiny plastics out of a plastic hinge while the fish were biting, and Callie finally said, Mom, this is why we need the other box. She was right. I moved everything into box 2 that afternoon instead of waiting another week, and that is the only real complaint I have about the whole kit.

The container is the other thing. The kit comes in its own box, and the box is fine for storage but miserable for fishing. Everything shifts. You open it on a windy pier and small plastics migrate into corners you did not know existed. I moved all of mine into box 2 of my Plano system within two weeks, and the original container now holds spare bodies in the garage. Budget for that mentally, even if you do not budget for it financially.

And the honest one: this kit is overkill for a pure catfish trip. My kids love fishing for catfish because catfish are not fussy and a piece of hot dog works. On those nights, this box stays closed. I am not going to pretend a crappie jig kit is the answer to every species in the reservoir, because it is not.

How It Fished Through the Spring and Fall

We had one night in April that I will remember for a while. A weeknight, pier, the light going orange, and the crappie decided to cooperate for about ninety minutes. We kept a dozen for supper, which is the most we have ever brought home from that pier. Callie rigged every one of those jigs herself. I baited hooks and untangled Ben and did not rig a single lure, and that was worth more to me than the fish.

Then October came and the fish moved. An evening trip with the light gone early and the water cooling off, the crappie holding lower than they had all spring. I fished the same jig head I had used in April, just slower, letting it fall until the line went slack before lifting the rod tip maybe six inches and letting it drop again. It took me three trips to stop overworking it. The first two fall trips I was twitching it like a grub and got nothing at all. The third one I got lazy and just let it hang there, and that is when the bites came. Nobody told me that. I figured it out by wasting two evenings.

The rest of the season was more normal. Some nights we caught four. Some nights we caught nothing and Ben found a turtle. The kit did not make fish appear. What it did was make the preparation easy enough that we actually went, on weeknights, after a full day of work and school. That is the real value of a kit like this for a family. It lowers the activation energy.

Fall has been slower overall, but the jigs still work when you can get a vertical presentation down to where the fish are sitting. I fish them off the pier with a slow lift and drop and let the split tail do whatever it does. Honestly, I still could not tell you exactly why it works. I can tell you it caught crappie in April and it caught crappie in October.

What It Does Not Do

It does not replace a rod and reel decision. I want to be clear about that, because I see reviews that treat tackle like it solves everything. Our kids fish simple five foot spinning outfits, one each, and the kit is only as good as the cast it is tied to. If your kid's reel is birds-nesting every third cast, a better jig will not fix it. We know, because that is exactly why we replaced our old combos in March.

There is no card in the box telling you which jig head to tie on in eight feet of water versus four, and no marking on the bodies to tell you which is which once they are out of their compartment. I sorted mine by eye the first week, gave up, and now I just pick whatever looks right. It has not hurt my catch rate, but if you are the kind of person who wants a system handed to you, this kit will make you build your own. I used a permanent marker on the bottom of my tray for about three months and then stopped bothering.

It does not come with a hook sharpener, extra bodies in bulk, or any organization beyond the molded compartments. You will learn the depth by fishing it, and if you are brand new to crappie, plan on a few trips where you are figuring things out instead of catching.

And it does not promise you fish. I want to say that plainly because I have read plenty of tackle copy that implies otherwise. We fish public water that gets a lot of pressure. Some nights it is empty. The kit catches fish when fish are there to be caught, and no piece of plastic changes that.

Who This Is For

If you are a parent who fishes from the bank or a public pier and you are tired of digging loose jig heads out of your vehicle, this kit is a straightforward yes. It is organized, the pieces are durable, and it hands a kid a job they can actually do. Callie went from asking me to rig her jig to rigging three of them before I finished tying my own knot, and that shift changed our trips.

It is also a good fit if you are new to crappie and want one purchase that covers the basics. The split tail bodies, jig heads and floats are the whole entry-level toolkit for vertical fishing, and 115 pieces means you can lose a handful figuring things out without running to the store.

And it is a good fit for the occasional angler who fishes a handful of times a year and does not want to build a tackle collection. One box, in the back of the vehicle, done.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if your kids are young enough that small parts are a genuine hazard or a genuine frustration. Ben was nine when we bought this and he still needs help. Under seven, this box is a supervised activity, not a way to keep them busy.

Skip it if you fish mostly for catfish, bass, or anything that eats a bigger bait. There is nothing in this kit sized for that, and you would be buying a very nice box of tackle you will not open.

Skip it if you already have a crappie jig collection you like. The bodies here are good, but they are not so different from what you can buy in packs that a full 115-piece kit makes sense as a duplicate. Buy the bodies you are missing instead.

And skip it if you want a lure with visible action on the retrieve. This is not that lure. The whole design philosophy is that the split tail stays open and the body stays quiet. If that sounds boring, it will fish boring for you.

What I Would Tell a Friend Standing Next to Me on the Pier

Buy the kit, then buy a small tray to put it in, because the container it comes in will drive you crazy by the second trip. Sit down with your kid at the kitchen table the night it arrives, the way I did with the reels the night our box came, and let them rig a few jigs while you watch. It takes ten minutes and it means they can do it alone later. And check your state's rules on size and creel limits before you keep anything, because that is not optional and it is not the same everywhere.

Eight months in, nothing in this kit has broken, nothing has been replaced, and it has earned its spot in box 2 of my tackle system. That is about as high as praise gets from me. It is not a magic box of fish. It is a well-made, well-assembled set of small jigs that made our weeknight trips possible, and around here that is the thing that matters.