Format Variant 1v1 Best of one
Shared Library
Known as Forgetful Fish, and as Dandân before it grew up. Two players, one deck. You both draw from the same library and both bury into the same graveyard, so the game is a slow argument over a resource neither of you owns.
Play Forgetful Fish All formats
At a glance
- Players Two
- Library One, shared
- Graveyard One, shared
- Hand, board, exile Private
- Deck Chosen by the host
- You lose by Drawing from empty
What is shared and what is not
- Shared: the library and the graveyard. One deck of at least sixty cards, chosen by the host, serves both players.
- Private: hand, battlefield and exile. What you draw is yours, and what you play is yours to keep.
- A card belongs to whoever cast it, so a creature that dies goes to the shared graveyard and can be reanimated by either player.
- Running out of cards is still a personal problem. The player who tries to draw from an empty library is the one who loses, so milling is aimed at a person, not at the table.
- Mulligans are free while your hand has fewer than two lands or fewer than two spells. Once the hand is functional you may keep, or take a normal London mulligan.
Card advantage becomes card denial
Everything you know about drawing cards inverts. A cantrip does not just find you a card, it takes one off the top that your opponent was about to have. Countering a spell puts it in a graveyard you both have access to. A Brainstorm decides what the next three draws are for whichever of you draws them. Even a fetchland shuffle is an aggressive act.
Because both players run the same sixty cards, there is no deck to hide behind and no surprise tech. Both of you know exactly what is in the library. All that remains is sequencing, information, and deciding when to spend a turn making sure your opponent never sees the thing you both know is in there.
Under the hood
Sharing a zone is not something the rules engine does out of the box. Endstep runs a patch series against Forge that gives the variant real shared zones rather than a simulation of them, so ownership, zone-change triggers and the empty-library loss all behave correctly instead of approximately.