What If Dandân Was Undead — Try Corrupted Ghoul!
What makes Dandân special within Magic: The Gathering (MTG) is its continued depth despite being created in 1996. The concept of Dandân offers ample design space and room for innovation.
Barrow Ghoul from Weatherlight is my new Dandân expansion. I call it Corrupted Ghoul. ForceofPhil maintains Dandân's epithet and refers to it as GhoulGhoul.
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Corrupted Ghoul a.k.a. GhoulGhoul
Creatures (18)
- 16 Barrow Ghoul [1][b]
- 2 Activated Sleeper [2][b]
Spells (28)
- 4 Corrupted Conviction [b]
- 2 Fatal Push [b]
- 4 Misinformation [b]
- 4 Unearth [b]
- 2 Chainers Edict [1][b]
- 4 Corpse Churn [1][b]
- 2 Grasp of Darkness [b][b]
- 4 Hymn to Tourach [b][b]
- 2 Gravepurge [2][b]
Enchantments (6)
- 2 Omen of the Dead [b]
- 4 Casting of Bones [2][b]
Lands (28)
- 12 Swamp [b]
- 4 Barren Moor [b]
- 2 Dakmor Salvage [b]
- 2 Memorial to Folly [b]
- 2 Polluted Mire [b]
- 2 Temple of Malady [b][g]
- 2 Underground Mortuary [b][g]
- 2 Witch Cottage [b]
The difference between the Dandân and Barrow Ghoul variants is that the former focuses on stack timing and mana management, while the latter focuses on graveyard management and raw cards.
Navigating GhoulGhoul revolves around graveyard management. Cards like Misinformation can change the direction of the game while manipulating the opponent's draw step. It might not appear as such at first glance, but GhoulGhoul's deck manipulation with a loaded graveyard enables many mind games depending on the board.
Be mindful that card draw in GhoulGhoul is not like Dandân since players often need to sacrifice a Barrow Ghoul for value via Corrupted Conviction or have an established graveyard to enable Corpse Churn or Gravepurge.
Misinformation by Richard Kane Ferguson
Casting of Bones requires Barrow Ghoul, but is all the more intriguing since it can be used on your opponent's Barrow Ghoul.
Hymn to Tourach may seem too strong on the surface, but it can easily backfire; timing matters. To see how flexible Barrow Ghoul is in the Dandân framework, you can add a card like Obstinate Baloth off a -splash to combat opposing Hymn to Tourachs. Activated Sleeper is wonderfully flexible.
GhoulGhoul demonstrates how thinking outside the box yields overlooked ideas. Shared-deck MTG as a concept is a deeply rich and relatively underexplored space.
Have a Dandân variation you'd like to share?
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Featured image: Barrow Ghoul by Bryan Talbot