Welcome @MerrillDeboer! 
Great to have you in the community — and you’ve picked an awesome
area to dive into. FX can be incredibly rewarding and visually satisfying to learn in Unreal Engine!
Best Starting Path for Beginners:
Start with Niagara. It’s Unreal’s current FX system and is super powerful, even for beginners. Don’t worry about Cascade — that’s legacy now.
You’ll also want a basic understanding of materials, since most Niagara particles use dynamic materials or shader effects to control appearance (glow, dissolve, flicker, etc.)
Beginner-Friendly Steps:
- Start with a simple fireball:
- Create a new Niagara System using a basic emitter (sprite renderer)
- Add a dynamic material (with an animated flame texture or color flicker)
- Control lifespan, velocity, size over time
- Tweak your material in the Material Editor
- Try panning a texture or adding a fresnel glow
- Use Blueprint to spawn the FX
- Hook it up to input or collision events in your prototype
Quick Tip for Staying Organized as You Learn
Once you start making multiple FX (fire, hit sparks, trails, etc.), it gets hard to track:
- Which ones are finished?
- Which ones need texture tweaks?
- Which Blueprint needs refactoring?
We built a plugin for this kind of thing called Asset Optics — it lets you:
- Add checklists and comments directly on each FX asset in the Content Browser
- Track what you’ve completed, need to fix, or want to polish later
- Sync it to a web dashboard so you stay organized across projects or machines
Totally optional, but a great help once you start building more than a couple effects — or when you revisit things a week later and wonder “wait, why is this Niagara system broken again?” 
Good luck with the fireball! 
You’re off to a great start — feel free to post progress!