Some reflections.
I can pinpoint the exact moment when my relationship with Magic changed pretty drastically. It all revolves around one silly little thing, DanDan, or as it’s more formally called, Forgetful Fish.
For those not in the know, Forgetful Fish is a self-contained micro-format made up of a single, shared 80-card deck. It’s almost a board game using the Magic game system and cards. As originally designed by Nick Floyd, the only creature contained within the deck is a quite bad one: DanDan, a creature with Islandhome, four power, and one toughness. The rest of the deck contains a variety of blue spells, most importantly eight Memory Lapse. The games devolve into messes of tempo plays, controlling the top card of the deck, and frantically trying to preserve your life total (which can be easily tracked with just a D6, thanks to you only taking instances of four damage). It feels like Magic, since you are playing a normal game of Magic in many ways, but at the same time, the card choices and DanDan itself forces you to make a lot of interesting choices that your average, “normal” game of Magic would not. When I first saw it, I fell in love immediately.
Discovering & Proseleytizing DanDan
It was March, 2022. I was at a cEDH event called Marchesa, one of the very first in now a massive wave of more serious tournaments for the format. A prominent player from Canada, Reid (known best by his handle Sickrobot, in classic online-dominated spaces fashion), was jamming games of this weird little deck nobody had heard of before. I got the chance to play, just once. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was the perfect amount of weird and asked me to think about Magic just slightly differently than I already did.
Jump forward almost another year, to CommandFest Richmond. My friend Dan happened to bring along his copy of DanDan, after also learning about it from the Canadians.
I snatched the deck from Dan and started showing everyone I could. Braden, another gospel acolyte of the fish. Jonathan Suarez, who really liked it. Plenty of other average players and creators too. This event feels, to me, like an accidental inflection point that I helped caused. The waves of DanDan really started rippling from here, culminating in Sam from Rhystic studies hitting Braden and I up and asking to be shown and taught DanDan by us at MagicCon Philadelphia. Obviously, after “Games Within Games | A History of ‘Forgetful Fish,’” was released, the format was truly introduced to the wider world for what it was. Something new, something unique. Something with soul imbued into it by its creator, Nick, who just wanted people to try his formats (there are two others besides Forgetful Fish, in case you were wondering). Taking a bunch of random old cards, together with a few new ones, and creating an experience that almost everyone I’ve showed has fallen completely in love with is something special, the likes of which it seems magic manages to capture fairly often, but for whatever reason, DanDan is the thing that has stuck with me.
Delving Into Forgetful Fish
Forgetful Fish offered not only a fun new way to play the game to me, but it gave me a little playground to play within. Obviously, people use Magic: the Gathering as a form of design sandbox all the time. Each Commander deck could be called a relatively custom creation based on every card made. Cube is becoming one of the most popular ways to engage with the game as people discover the joy of curating their own custom draft experience at different power levels. The range from pauper cubes (commons only) to Vintage cubes (strong cards, usually including the Power 9) to Desert cubes (where you have to draft the lands you play) to the now-iconic 100 Ornithopters (exactly what it sounds like) are just points on an infinite plane of possibilities.
Since Forgetful Fish has a solid basis to work from with things I wanted to preserve, mainly the core of 10 DanDans, 8 Memory Lapses, and four Accumulated Knowledges, it gave me a safe place space with which to make changes. Some of the two-of utility spells had some stinkers in them. They were easy to cut. Figuring out what to replace them with instead was the hard part, something I’ve been working on for years now. Turns out, it’s hard to effectively playtest when you don’t get to play that much, but you can do a lot in the theater of the mind. I also have played… several hundred games of DanDan at this point. I’m still really bad at it.
Together with plenty of other people around the internet, I started tinkering and experimenting with my DanDan deck and have ended up with a few different bespoke versions that I personally enjoy. I learned a lot. I wrote about it a lot. In fact, I’ve written so much about DanDan, both in long and short forms, that it feels right to reiterate many of my thoughts in a more cohesive fashion here. I’ve gone the full circle on DanDan deck design focusing purely on new player experience to create something that would intrigue and challenge them, even if they are a bit confused. I’ve interviewed Nick Floyd for my podcast, something that has yet to go live because of, well, life. I took all of my thoughts and lessons about Forgetful Fish and put them into an article so long it would take you 25 minutes to read – if you didn’t look at any of the decklists closely. My thinking about deckbuilding has changed since then too! New cool cards have come out! My Azorious deck I put forward in that as a concept sucked as soon as I played one game with it!
Maybe one day I’ll take all of the lessons I’ve learned – especially about how important the new player experience of your thing may be – and put it into something that isn’t DanDan. Up top I said that it pretty radically changed my relationship with Magic and it has, for that exact reason. I always knew, in the abstract of course, that Magic can be used for more than Standard and Brawl and Commander and Legacy. There are infinitely more possibilities on the massive tree that is Magic: the Gathering. It just takes someone to round all of those possibilities and turn them into something resonant, interesting, and cohesive. It’s been an interesting experience that I won’t forget and it seems plenty of other people have enjoyed watching my journey and setting off on their own DanDan tweaking experiment.
What DanDan Is to Others
In the wake of the DanDan Secret Lair announcement, I polled social media for people’s experience with the format. Obviously, I have my own history and presuppositions with it, but I was curious to hear from others about why they like it – or don’t.
I heard plenty of great stuff – from someone who’s wife found interest in the format, to a memory with a friend (who was me, ha) to sharing how it inspired them to make their own mini-games, little formats, or other similar stuff. You should read all of them for yourself, if you’re interested. One thing came through to me time and again – people view it as a great way to engage with a game they love, with people they love. An extra helpful thing: you only need one deck for two people to play. It brings like minded people together and gives them something fun to do. Is that all that different from the rest of Magic? No. But, as I already wrote about myself, I think the real power is showing people that they can just… make stuff with Magic cards that aren’t a new Commander-lite format.
One player, Dylan Foley, was nice enough to send me a quite long and well thought out email. Dylan is a local of Nick’s and plays with him regularly as part of a meet-up that Floyd hosts. Here is a short excerpt from that letter which stuck with me and captures much of what I find most appealing about the proliferation of DanDan the broader effect it can and has had on people:
“DanDan is the duct tape wallet of Magic the Gathering formats. It’s a brilliant idea that displays the versatility of the materials that comprise it, while also highlighting the ingenuity of its creator to build a product without the gravity of rules.
Nick and his growing portfolio of intriguing formats have unlocked a new way for people to look at Magic. In the contextualization of games between different formats, I would predominantly think about cards in relation to their usefulness in Limited, EDH, CanLander, etc. It’s been a blast looking at cards and now also thinking how could the RULES or GAME change to make them absolutely sweet to play with. I’ll plan on debuting an X-Cost matters mini game next month with this new inspiration in tow. The working title is “X-Gon Give it to Ya”. We’ll see if the name makes it out of playtesting.
With Nick’s generosity, he’s made the Game Designer Hat a one size fits all. It’s easier than ever for people to wear it and perceive the games they love in a different and exciting way. On the other hand, his format makes Magic so approachable to someone who is brand new. Even if my girlfriend won’t ever shuffle up 100 sleeved cards for an hour and a half long slug fest, we can share a short game together about fish passing by each other like ships in the night.
In the ever-growing expansion of Magic’s terraforming into different tropes and IP’s for the Consumer to tour, DanDan remains a small sliver of the uncut wilderness that those with the right trail map can find and savor.”
Exactly, Dylan. Nick is by no means the first to have done it, but it seems as if he and others like him are making Game-design-via-messing-with-magic-cards more accessible than ever. Will there being a one-size-fits-all, “official” DanDan list stifle that creativity though?
The DanDan Secret Lair
Secretly, I think in the abstract, the DanDan Secret Lair is pretty awesome. As someone who has thought about the ideals I would want to bring to every game of DanDan via my own personal deck’s design, it’s fascinating to see what card choices that Professional Magic Designers make when set to the task. I think Carmen and Abe did a dang good job at what they made. It’s some form of official acknowledgement of Nick’s work, even if he wasn’t explicitly involved. Even Nick himself is happy that it exists and doesn’t necessarily want credit – he just wants a copy of the dang thing.
I want to say thank you to everyone who is supporting me and acknowledging my little contribution to this game that has been a part of my life for over 30 years. I am glad I was able to put a little, but long lasting stamp on the game. That’s what really matters to me.
— Nick Floyd (@magicstorytime.bsky.social) September 27, 2025 at 7:54 PM
As I’ve already said publicly though, I think Nick deserved a bit better. He could have been publicly involved or acknowledged in some way with I’m sure little blowback. Other format creators and luminaries have gotten to be involved in projects, why not Nick?
I’m no stranger to the concept of chasing the Wizards of the Coast seal of approval – my past was largely defined by it. Every person who has been a small to mid-sized creator in the Magic space has probably had their own brush with the concept as well. Getting that first preview card, getting some kind of boost or advertising contract (not many of those left anymore), or even being asked to work in an event setting for the company can be and is often life changing for someone trying to make their way in the commercialized content space.
At the end of the day though, it usually ends up meaning doing free labor for a corporation that doesn’t care about you, made of people who do care about Magic: the Gathering. A fine line point that often haunts my relationship with the game. The people make the corporation care about the game, but at the end of the day it still remains a commercial behemoth that only cares abstractly about creating as much value for Hasbro shareholders as possible. Of course, as we’ve recently learned, it’s quite possible that Wizards is the only aspect of Hasbro keeping the company afloat, so the hits will keep coming.
The commercialization of DanDan is, inevitably, frustrating to me. It is, at its very essence, something made by a guy with “cool Magic formats to share,” spread through some forum posts that got minimal traction, yet somehow found their way into my hands and others. It’s also concerning to me that this way of playing Magic, which has so far been so freeform and conducive to experimentation from community members, will get suffocated by a “canon” list existing directly from Wizards of the Coast, as cool as that list may be.
I’m sure I have a biased perspective here, being one who has in my own way benefited from the micro-format greatly both in enjoyment and notoriety. But I am never one to write with flowery prose, I just am frustrated and don’t have a solution and neither do you. It all comes back to the same problem of Magic being no longer something that feels game first – but instead money first.
Why does the ultimate validation of something I love about the game feel so bad?
Diminishing Returns on the Stack
More ink has already been spilled than I could possibly put here about how it feels weird to see something like Forgetful Fish, which could be construed as a form of Magic Punk, get subsumed by Wizards. I started this article in my head three weeks ago, determined to mainly write about how weird and “bad” the Secret Lair product is, but I don’t have it in me anymore. I would prefer to celebrate what DanDan is, independent of being turned into a single, solidified canon product.
The most important impact DanDan will have long term is to bring a format that’s a bit weird into to the cultural limelight. It’ll show people that they can do weird stuff with Magic cards, without sliding towards another riff on Commander. Is there a world where Forgetful Fish is a relic of a bygone era, where people were more interested in making weird stuff with magic cards, before Commander took over everything? Possibly. But I see more and more people experimenting with what Magic can be every single day. I like to think that DanDan (along with the work by people like Nile Joan Rivers) has had a huge hand in that.
And hey – there’s always those two other Nick Floyd formats to try. When I had the chance to meet him at MagicCon Minneapolis, he wasn’t that interested in talking about DanDan. People already knew about that. We played Trippin’ and R.P.S. instead.
Callahan Jones (he/him) is not a content creator. He’s a Gamecube collector, DanDan fanatic and occasionally, very occasionally, has a thought to share about Magic: The Gathering. Follow his pursuits on Bluesky or on his personal Substack.