The Forgetful Fish Secret Lair being shadow dropped at MagicCon Atlanta was a deeply strange experience for me. I knew that, in some ways, it existing at all was my fault. I had been a major evangel of the format for some time. I had thought and posted and written about and played the format more than anyone I knew not named Nick Floyd, the guy who invented it. Nick Floyd wasn’t mentioned or involved in the Secret Lair at all. Cool. That’s really cool. I posted about it. People got pissed. The Secret Lair disappeared for months, mysteriously reappearing only after they could get Nick out for a photo-op visit. It seems like a nice gesture. Nick’s happy. I’m happy. Why did I buy one of the Secret Lairs?
When I was first taught Dandân, the 80-card shared-deck format also known as Forgetful Fish, I knew I was playing something special. The pitch of a classic Blue Mage Tempo and or Control duel taking place through the medium of horrible 4/1 Islandhome fish was enough to pique my interest – getting the chance to jam sealed the deal for me. It was after a relatively-early-on Competitive Commander tournament and a guy from Canada, Reid, had brought the deck down.
Soon thereafter, I borrowed my friend Dan’s list and taught as many people as I could at SCG Richmond. From there, somehow, the format gained enough momentum that one Sam of Rhystic Studies heard about the format and asked my friend Braden & I to show it to him at MagicCon Philadelphia. The rest, as they say, is history.
From Nick Floyd to Me to You
You’ll have to excuse the hyperbolic title – obviously it isn’t exactly my fault that you logged onto the Secret Lair website a little only a month ago and tried to buy a beautiful preconstructed version of the Forgetful Fish decklist. I’m not really interested in revisiting the disaster that ended up being for everyone involved. I was just a small cog in the machine that ended up raising the popularity of Nick Floyd’s creation enough to result in Wizards capitalizing upon that community sentiment in a capitalistic manner.
The Secret Lair did have me reflecting a bit on my own history with the format and with Magic itself. Forgetful Fish was, for a long time, largely only passed from one person to another in the form of quick demos between rounds or after events. As Sam’s video points out, DanDan’s trackable beginnings, at least on readily available parts on the internet, seems to be in forum posts that few people interacted with or cared to comment on. Yet, somehow, by 2022, it had pierced cultural consciousness enough to reach me. It had to take quite the path to do it, though. It turns out my learning is all thanks to competitive Magic grinders, go figure. I can’t claim to know them but I was able to get in touch with them to confirm that they taught so-and-so the game and that they did indeed learn it from such and such a person.
Let’s say that you, oh reader, learned about Forgetful Fish from Sam’s video on the topic. That makes you step zero. We move to step one, which is Sam himself. Step two would be the person who technically taught it to Sam, Braden Bowdish, who showed it by yours truly. Step four has already been referenced, with me learning from Reid (also known as SickRobot in online spaces). This is the history I always knew and had never reached beyond. But the question popped into my head – “What if Reid remembers where he learned?”
He saw it on an Anuraag Das stream? No wonder the game jumped up to Canada. I got to work, digging through available VODs on Anu’s Youtube channel. No luck, I fear. Luckily, I managed to get the tip from someone else that it was known Legacy enthusiast, J White, also known as Pokemoki, who had convinced Anu to play between rounds of Star City Games Philadelphia, one of the very first events available past the major COVID lockdowns. How lucky am I that this happened to have happened on camera, since Anu was extremely into IRL streaming paper tournaments at the time? How lucky am I that Reid was watching & decided to jump to buy the deck and bring it to a cEDH tournament.
Tracking down the rest of the history was, luckily for me, as easy as tagging @Fireshoes on social media and sending a few Discord and Facebook messages. Pokemoki was taught by a grinder Mac Ira, who was taught by a grinder named Nick Girardi (“there was about a year span when I always had it with me, and used to play it at GPs between rounds”) who learned from Steven Nesteby who believes he first read about it on the long defunct Magic Online Trading League forms and then pulled his own list from Nick Floyd’s own Google doc outlining the format. I did my best to scour said forum’s archive for any posts referring to Dandân or Forgetful Fish and didn’t find much – but the searching features on the site seem pretty lossy at best.
That’s eight steps in the Rhystic Studies DanDan teaching tree – a point I mainly reference because it is the obvious jumping point off to a wider Forgetful Fish popularity. However, I do honestly believe that such a weird but genius little way to play a game that is *like* Magic but not *quite* Magic as we traditionally think of it would have continued to spread like wildfire through word of mouth, through different Magic communities, even without the push from Sam. Having published tens of thousands of words on it at this point though, I may simply be biased.
Dandân Forever
I’ll admit it – I bought the Forgetful Fish Secret Lair. I wasn’t even that excited about it. I just wanted the foil “bonus” Vision Charms I knew would be in the package so I could finally have a full-foil version of my own list. Is that how they get us? It came in the mail, I picked the Charms and I stuffed the rest in the cabinet after admiring some of the other new art in the package. There it will probably stay for some time. Did I really just pay $99 for two cards? I regret it every day.
Since the release of Sam’s video, thousands of people have experienced the joy of a silly little way to play Magic that feels like the game we know and love but a little bit different. The deck’s simple construction, made of obvious pillars that shall-not-be-touched and a breadth of utility two-ofs that beg to be experimented with, invites the entrepreneurial game designer to tinker. The idea of using Magic game pieces as tools to create related but unique board game experiences is not entirely novel but hasn’t reached terminal velocity either.
To help jog the mind while working on this piece, I booted up my ongoing Powered Cube run on Arena. Finished up a solid 7-2 best of one with a cute little red and blue tempo-y pile. Ancestral Recall helps. Cube is a format where the rapid popularization in recent years makes so much sense. Making the game your own, usually involves community by default (gotta get eight people together… somehow), allows for infinite expression. At the same time that Dandân (and all the “variants,” as Nick Floyd prefers to call them) explodes, weirder and weirder cubes, with 100 Ornithopters being the most popular example, enter the scene as people realize they don’t have to do their best to mimic a traditional retail limited format and can just noodle away on Magic’s game engine. Do your own thing with Magic. Create your own person-to-person threads throughout the game’s history. Have fun doing it. Don’t buy a fuckin’ Secret Lair like me. Buy beat Chronicles fish or proxy it. Paypal Nick Floyd $100 instead. Dandân forever.
Callahan Jones (he/him) is not a content creator. He’s a Gamecube collector, Dandân fanatic and occasionally, very occasionally, has a thought to share about Magic: The Gathering. Follow his pursuits on Bluesky or on his personal Substack.