MAGIC 101
Let's get one thing straight. If you, imbecile that you are, think you know magic, you're wrong. And not only are you wrong, you are a total, full-blown, shit-for-brains fucking retard. I'd hate to overuse the "r word", in case this serious, no-bullshit magic guide starts reading like the rabies froth addled slew of racial slurs you'd find a 12 year old call of duty player spitting into a blue yeti mic. But I simply can't help it. That is what you are. Calling you a retard is like calling a cat 'felis catus', or a dog 'canis lupus'. It's your scientific classification; 'homo retardus'. Your retardedness lives in your blood. Or it would but most definitley does, since this whole tangent is dealing in hypotheticals. God how fucking embarassing. Let's outline some basic principles.
#1: Magic does not need energy, stamina, mana, chakra or whatever fucking else you want to call it.
You can tell someone is a faker when they say they can't (very conventiently) do a certain spell because they "don't have the ingredients" or because it requires "too much energy". This is not how magic works.
Casting spells doesn't require an exceptional amount of energy, no more than that you would use for any other everyday task under your capability, and spells don't need specific ingredients unless that is an aspect of your aid.
#2: The ability to do magic comes from having a free soul/ a broken seal.
If you need me to explain what a soul is please go terminate your existence.
Now 'seal' in this context doesnt refer to the ocean animal but is instead used to mean 'something fixed around the edge of an opening to prevent liquid or gas flowing through it'.
Every soul has a non-tangible seal on it, preventing one from being able to do magic. When this seal is broken, hereditarily or through freak circumstances, the user is then able to do magic. That's it. No strings attatched.
Keep in mind though that breaking one's seal is incredibly difficult, maybe even impossible for most people. I'll admit that this isn't something I know a lot about. I'm a magician from birth, so not my area of expertise, and it's not a clear-cut process that I can just write a tutorial for. Most magical literature is written for people who can already do magic. If I ever find anything more on the topic I'll update this section.
Now, onto the next principle of magic...
#3: An aid is any action or object that allows one to effectively channel their magic.
I already know what your worthless existence is going to spit at me in the face of all my tiresome efforts. "haha! AIDS!". At this point I realise telling you to kill yourself just isn't enough. I understand now, in this moment, the empty, depressive feeling that soaked itself in your father's bones four beers in, before he got in the car and left that night, making it the last time you've ever seen him.
Killing yourself would be the best and smartest thing you've ever done, so obviously you're never going to do that. What you should do instead is disappointingly rot away in your cold, ambitionless, lard-filled human body, either becoming a needlehead or an alcoholic, two cosmically unimportant paths for a cosmically unimportant person, before you eat shit in a car accident.
Anyways, what you need to get from this section is that, while a free soul makes the difference between being capable of magic, an aid is what lets you channel that magic into spellcasting.
Now you're probably thinking to yourself, 'This needing an aid to do magic business sounds exactly the same as needing resources to do magic'. Well in that case you deserve an award for having made it this far in life being that fucking stupid.
Aside from the fact that there are certain universal acts of magic that don't require the use of an aid, not all aids are finite. Waving a wand, brewing potions, and even something as obscure as dancing or playing an instrument can all be used to channel magic. If you have a shitty aid that needs you to use one entirely specific plant to do any fucking magic then maybe you should just kill yourself because thats not my problem and also thats really embarassing.
Although the name implies that they help you to more easily do magic, it is unheard of for a magician not to use an aid of some kind. Most stick to using the same one or two throughout their lifetime. You find the aid that works for you through trial and error, or by studying from another magician.