A deck of Magic cards is never too far when the family travels. Our latest family trip, minus Christian as his schedule prevented him from joining us, was no exception. It got me to thinking that I should maybe list out where our Magic decks have been.

Our latest vacation took us to the Bahamas. I won’t bore you with all the details but it was a lovely trip. The beach where we stayed was stunning. Unfortunately, strong winds over the ocean meant that we could not go swimming in the sea for two of the days we were there due to the strong undertows.

As happened with another recent trip, bringing Magic cards with you does mean that you should prepare for a little extra scrutiny when going through airport security. I guess that a Commander deck into an Ultimate Guard Boulder looks quite unusual when going through the scanning machine. And so our bags got pulled for a closer look. This also happened on a skiing trip Noah and I did to Whistler a couple of years back. Interestingly, the same did not happen when we left the Bahamas. Maybe the person manning the scanning machine was a Magic player himself and recognized the odd black square on the screen as a Commander deck.

While the opportunities to play were limited, Noah and I did manage to squeeze in one game one evening. His upgraded Warhammer 40K Necrons deck, led by Imotekh the Stormlord, went up against my unmodified Zinnia, Valley’s Voice deck from Bloomburrow.

Noah wisely took out his (there is a story there for another time) Mana Crypt before the trip, recognizing not only that it was a pricy card but also that it was now banned in Commander.

It was a closely fought affair but the Necrons prevailed as they have so often done in the past thanks to the ever-growing wave of Necron Warrior artifact creature tokens. I had started strong but not being able to shut down his token generating engine meant that I soon lost my early advantage. It was at least not the crushing rout Ruhan suffered during our last trip!

Sadly, there was no opportunity for other games as the trip was quite short and there were too many other things to do.

Our decks have travelled with us on a few other trips but I have not really tracked our world Magic experiences in the past. I will try to do a better job of it going forward.