What Is Your Everyday Carry Actually For?

Everyday carry is one of those subjects magicians and mentalists can obsess over.

What is in your wallet? Which gimmicks do you never leave home without? How many effects can you fit into one pocket? Before long, your everyday carry stops looking like something you carry every day and starts looking like a small travelling magic shop.

I think there is a more useful question to ask before deciding what goes into your pockets:

What do you actually want your EDC to do?

That answer will be different for everyone.

Perhaps you want to be capable of performing a complete 25-minute set at any moment, in almost any environment. If someone invites you to perform at a party, you want to know that you already have enough material with you to say yes.

Or perhaps you only want to be ready for the casual moment. You are sitting in a coffee shop, someone discovers that you are a magician or mentalist and asks, “Can you show me something?” You perform one strong piece, leave them with an impression of what you do, and then carry on with your day.

There is also a third possibility. Your EDC may be less about performing socially and more about being ready when you meet a potential client. In that case, being prepared is not only about the effect you perform. Perhaps one of your business cards is incorporated into the trick, so they are left with both a memorable experience and your contact details. Perhaps you have a QR code ready that takes them directly to your website, showreel or performance packages. These things might not be magic tricks, but they can still be an important part of your everyday carry. If the opportunity leads to a conversation about booking you, you should be prepared for what happens after the demonstration as well as for the demonstration itself.

The point is that an EDC should solve a particular problem. Until you know what that problem is, it is very easy to carry things simply because another performer does.

How much are you really willing to carry?

Once you know what you want to be prepared for, the next question is how minimal you want to be?

Do you want everything to fit inside your wallet? Are you happy to carry an extra pen? What about a deck of cards, a coin or a gimmick that lives in a separate pocket?

There is no correct answer. Some performers enjoy having a number of possibilities available to them. Others dislike the feeling of checking several pockets before leaving home.

It is also worth being honest about the image you want to create. You might apparently perform with nothing more than an ordinary wallet, while secretly having other objects distributed around your pockets. That can still create an extremely clean experience for the audience. But are you happy to maintain that system every day? Will those objects genuinely be with you when the unexpected opportunity arises, or only when you remember to pack them?

An EDC that looks perfect when arranged on a table is not necessarily an EDC that survives contact with real life.

My own everyday carry

My EDC is deliberately simple.

I carry a wallet: an original version of the Shadow Wallet at the moment, which is a minimal peek wallet. Inside it I keep around four blank business cards. Sometimes I also take a Sharpie with me.

That is it.

I do not carry a deck of cards or a collection of additional gimmicks. Everything else stays at home.

The most important thing for me was making my EDC practical. I did not want it to be something I had to prepare whenever I left the house. I take my wallet because I would be carrying it anyway, and as soon as I have it with me, I know I am ready to perform.

Of course, I will usually also have my phone. That gives me access to apps and various iOS Shortcuts. Then there is propless mentalism, with SABA being the method I probably value most within my own repertoire.

But this is not an argument that everyone should buy a peek wallet, fill their phone with magic apps or learn lots of propless systems. My choices suit the kind of material I perform and the way I want to carry it. Your answer may be completely different.

The useful question is “How much can I get from the things I have chosen?”

One object should not mean one trick

A blank business card is not a trick. It is a tool.

With one billet, I could reveal a name, give a reading or perform a drawing duplication. It might become part of a coin-in-hand routine, a liar-and-truth-teller presentation or something else entirely.

Thinking this way changes how you build an EDC. Rather than adding a new object for every new effect, you begin exploring the range hidden inside a few ordinary objects.

Take whatever is currently in your wallet and ask yourself:

• What information could this help me reveal?

• What premises could I build around it?

• Could it be used openly in one routine and secretly in another?

• Could the same object be useful in several different environments?

• If my preferred method became impossible in a particular environment, what else could I do with it?

That investigation is far more valuable than endlessly collecting pocket tricks. It builds flexibility rather than simply giving you a longer list of effects.

Borrowed objects are part of the system

Your EDC does not need to be limited to the objects physically in your pockets.

Think about what is commonly available around you. Someone else’s phone has a calculator. A cafe may have napkins, sugar packets, cups and wooden stirrers. A restaurant has cutlery. Coins and pens can often be borrowed. Each of these can become part of what you are prepared to perform, even though you did not carry it into the room.

This does require a little realism. A routine that depends on a teaspoon is useful in a restaurant but less useful at an outdoor wedding. A trick with a coffee stirrer is perfect in a cafe and rather less impressive if you have to produce the stirrer from your wallet six hours later.

The environment should not merely provide the props. It should make their use feel natural.

In a cafe, that might mean performing with a sugar packet or using the paddle move with a stirrer. In a restaurant, it could be something with a napkin or a piece of spoon bending. At an outdoor event where none of those objects are available, you might turn to propless mentalism or retrieve the one item you know is always in your wallet.

This is why learning a small number of versatile principles can be more useful than carrying a large number of specialised gimmicks. You begin to see potential material in the setting around you.

EDC is a mental checklist

Perhaps everyday carry is not really everything you carry.

Perhaps it is better understood as a mental checklist: what you have on you, what is likely to be around you and what you are capable of doing with both.

The physical objects matter, but the real preparation happens before the moment of performance. You know what you could do in a cafe, at a restaurant, outdoors, in somebody’s home or in front of a potential client. You understand which pieces can expand into a longer performance and which ones are ideal for a quick, memorable demonstration.

That clarity is what allows you to look prepared when someone suddenly asks you to perform.

So before adding another trick to your wallet, empty your pockets and ask yourself what you are actually preparing for. Then look again at the few things you genuinely carry every day and investigate how much more they might be capable of.

The best EDC is not the one containing the greatest number of tricks. It is the smallest, most practical system that still allows you to create the kind of experience you want to create.