Dandân (Casual)

Rules and how to play:

• Two players share a common 80 card library and the graveyard.

• Players start at 20 life each, and a hand of seven cards (which is also the maximum hand size).

• You win the game by reducing your opponent's life total to zero (this can only be done by attacking with Dandân), or by making your opponent draw from an empty library.

• Players can take a free mulligans if the starting hand contains 0-1 or 6-7 lands, revealing any hand not meeting the criteria. Then, once the previous criteria have been met, they may opt to take further mulligans for which standard mulligan rules apply.

• Alternatively, before starting the game, one or two basic Islands can be dealt to each player, then each player draws to seven cards.

• Players opening hands are dealt like a game of poker, one card for the first player, one card for the second player, and repeat. If an effect causes both players to draw a card, then the active player deals the cards in the same fashion as the opening hands, starting with themselves.

• If an effect returns a card from “your” graveyard or library, it refers now to the shared graveyard/library. Also, the “owner” of a card is simply its caster.

• Cards from the sideboard can be exchanged for variation, or to make the deck more/less aggressive.

Tips and guidelines:

• No other creature than Dandân should be used, as the islandhome and the one point of toughness allows for a unique and creative gameplay experience with interesting interactions.

• Spells that changes the basic land type of islandhome to another land type can be used as removal spells for the Dandân, as can effects that changes all lands of one type to another type.

• The graveyard matters for cards like Accumulated Knowledge, and there are also four lands that provide red mana for the flashback cost for Mystic Retrieval.

• Diminishing Returns offers a way to reset the hands, graveyard and library.

• When considering other cards for this variant, damage and lifegain/loss effects should always be in multiples of four. This makes it possible to use a normal six sided die to keep track of the 5 hits it needs to win.

• Note that the inclusion of any tutor effect (like for example Mystical Tutor) lets you know your opponent's entire hand by process of elimination, and should be avoided if this effect is not wanted.

• Cards are preferably used in pairs of two or more, since a single card lets you know that your opponent can't possibly have the same card in their hand.

Alternative option (in the maybeboard):

• Instead of using the red mana for the two Mystic Retrieval, I have included an optional way to instead use black mana and the card Forbidden Alchemy. So if these cards are exchanged, the scrylands / bouncelands should also be changed accordingly to provide black instead of red mana. The "red variant" variant can sometimes lead to very long games with repeated access to cards in the graveyard, and recasting of shuffling effects like Diminishing Returns. The "black variant" avoids this, and even mills the library, and could be preferred in order to avoid very long games.