How do you make a setting feel magical without losing track of

Be spare with the magic, or produce a well-crafted magic system that doesn't violate any of the universal laws.

>>50322139
What about a high fantasy setting?

Make magic small in scale, subtle, and pervasive. Magic is everywhere, in everything, and believed in by all; but almost never powerful or efficacious enough to change the world.

>>50322108
Keep it rare but very powerful

Make magic magical. Too many settings just make magic into superpowers with little to no mysticism or symbolism behind it, too rational, too explained and almost scientific. The peasants believe in magic, they might even have seen, it is everywhere after all, the trees, the moon, the stars, those certain types of plants, or hours in a day, or days in a month, or months in a year.

What you're looking for is consistency. Realism today means magic is shit and dangerous and pointless, but exists for fantasy's sake, while everything else is grey and brown and terrible with 42 types of polearms. Magic can exist around everything without necessarily intruding into things, just look at so much of history where people believed in an innately magical world full of strangeness and wonder, yet it's a world with 42 types of polearms. Look to folklore and history for consistency in a setting with magic, all you need to do is be creative as to how you show some of the effects.

>>50322789
For example?

I would suggest looking to literature. China Mieville in particular created a fantasy world with a lot of cooky shit (even stuff that overlaps with scifi territory, like transhumanism and bioengineering).

IMO it stays grounded because he kept the focus on grounded, relateable characters, who are not fantasy superheros.

>>50322108
You could try to use something similar to Irregular at Magical High School, which is basically, "Magic as a Science: The Setting." Just, ignore the plot and look at the magic system in the story's universe.

seconding China Mieville, the settings are full of crazy magical shit but there's what you could call "social realism", feels like real societies.