What Is Dandân?
Written by Carmen Klomparens
Howdy, gamers!
Welcome to the debut of a unique offering from the Secret Lair team, the forgetful fish itself: Dandân! My name is Carmen Klomparens, and I partnered with fellow game designer Abe Corrigan from the Play Design team to engineer something truly special. So, what is Dandân?
Dandân is a format meant to be a self-contained experience for lovers of blue magic by lovers of blue magic. The gameplay is very different than Magic gameplay of today and lends itself to longer, grindier games where you must fight for card advantage. It will take multiple turns of attacking for somebody to win, and the biggest fights in this format are going to happen on the stack.
To facilitate that experience and push it to its limit, the rules of Dandân are a bit different than normal Magic. To lead on the familiar, players still start with 20 life and seven cards in their opening hands. There’s still a maximum hand size of seven and attempting to draw from an empty library is a way to lose the game. There are a few differences, however:
- Players have a shared library and graveyard. Anything referring to “your” graveyard or library is referencing the shared zone.
- The “owner” of a card on the stack or permanent on the battlefield is considered to be the person who cast it.
- Whenever multiple players are drawing cards simultaneously, they are dealt one at a time, starting with the active player (i.e., whoever is going first or whoever’s turn it is).
- When taking mulligans, if a player draws a hand with less than two lands or spells, that player may reveal the hand and take a free mulligan. This no longer applies once that player has taken a regular mulligan.
All of that is mostly to say that the games play similarly to normal Magic, outside of mulligans being a bit more forgiving, with some codifying how shared graveyards and libraries work. But Dandân isn’t just a rule set; it’s defined by the cards it’s played with.
Designing Dandân
Written by Abe Corrigan
Hello! My name is Abe Corrigan, and I’m a game designer on the Play Design team. As a lover of wacky formats and complex blue gameplay, I’m thrilled to have worked on the Secret Lair Dandân Deck alongside Carmen Klomparens. Now, we get to share it with you all today.
From a top-level perspective, we wanted to stay true to the Dandân experience pioneered by Nick Floyd and iterated by the community, leaving us uninterested in large-scale overhauls. Our main environmental focus was to make tempo Dandâns more impactful in average games, where we found trading up on mana with removal and grinding opponents out with card advantage to be overly effective compared to landing early Dandâns and protecting them. We were wary of going too far, wanting to move the pendulum in favor of early Dandân not fully swinging it, and long technical games played on the stack are crucial to the Dandân experience. Let’s get into some individual cards!
Notable Inclusions
Supplant Form was a clunky conditional card to resolve being six mana, so it wasn’t an effective tool in games revolving around early Dandâns. On the other hand, Control Magic is an iconic card that is difficult to resolve as a four-mana sorcery-speed card but has a large impact on the game when you do so. We also appreciate Control Magic as a haymaker that makes the game about Dandân.
A simple cantrip that plays well, Chart a Course is another way to reward attacking with Dandân. We enjoyed the puzzle of determining whether to cast Chart a Course early in the game or save it to go up another card if you don’t have a Dandân attack in the near future.
The inclusion of an extra-turn spell was a more experimental idea that we immediately enjoyed when trying it. A five-mana sorcery creates an interesting dynamic in a Memory Lapse world, where leveraging mana advantages and increments of spending are both crucial to Dandân. Capture of Jingzhou is difficult to resolve but can create huge tempo and mana swings in the game, as well as string together with Mystic Sanctuary. Engineering scenarios where you fight over something on your opponent’s turn only to untap and slam Capture creates exciting fireworks in the late game.
In testing, we found Diminishing Returns difficult to resolve at four mana, and even if you did so you were often tapped out even in the late game due to a flurry of instants being cast with it on the stack. This would result in your opponent getting to untap with all their mana and a fresh grip of cards first. With passing often being your next move after resolving a draw-seven in Dandân, we moved to Day’s Undoing as a cheaper option being slightly easier to force through in a counter war.
These are some simple utility lands to add texture into the late game. Cutting red removed Temple of Epiphany and Izzet Boilerworks from the list, so we were in the market for some more variation in the land row. Haunted Fengraf highlights how cards function differently in same deck within self-contained environments versus broader Magic, and the output isn’t quite so random in a Forgetful Fish world.
Notable Exclusions
A common inclusion in Dandân, Mystic Retrieval can create a frustrating play pattern if your opponent is the only one with a red source or if they have a mana advantage. Resolving expensive sorcery-speed cards is difficult enough in a Memory Lapse world, and the number of times Mystic Retrieval was detrimental to cast even when it resolved landed us on excluding it in our version. Additionally, we liked the aesthetics of a strictly mono-blue approach.
Perhaps the largest departure from most Dandân lists, we found Vision Charm to be one of the main culprits of eroding the power of tempo Dandân starts. One-mana instant speed Wrath of God is absurdly powerful, and we believe it’s more fun for players to gain more of an advantage when up multiple Dandâns on board.
Turns out sharing is caring; the Secret Lair Dandân Deck has everything you need to split a library and dive into this fan-favorite format with a friend. This deck will be available through the Chaos Vault at MagicSecretLair.com tomorrow, March 16, at 9 a.m. PT. And watch out for Memory Lapse. Remember: they always have it.