Magnetic Energy Storage

So the other day I said to myself, "Self, magnets attract and repel each other. That sounds like work." Then I started thinking: the act of magnetizing NdFeB could be viewed as an act of energy storage. If you take a screw and crank a bunch of very strong magnets together, they should resist that arrangement until they're demagnetized. The question would be: how could this resistance be harvested? One possible way might be to compress a gas, but it'd probably be a lot easier to just compress a gas itself. With magnets, you don't have to worry about gas canisters exploding, but I'm kinda baffled as to how one can extract the energy. Maybe just a stupidly high amount of mechanical advantage?