I think everyone has covered it here but it's doable to do what you are aiming for.
For keeping the mandarin:
-Live rock rubble pile that you feed everyday
-Use old rock from an existing system. Helps seed the tank with pods faster.
-Let the tank mature (I was able to get a mandarin after 7 months)
-Feed rotifers, nannochloropsis, coral freny, etc to help keep the pod population up
-You can probably ween the mandarin onto frozen in time. I've never had to do this. The mandarin is nice and fat and I've never seen him do anything other than pick at the rocks
-You can use a pod production system like they do in non-photosynthetic tanks but that's probably a little extreme for just a mandarin. You could to a miniature half-assed version though.
-You can keep almost anything with a mandarin as everything else just seems to ignore them. Watch out for crabs, lobsters, etc that will go for slow moving fish though. Hermits and shrimp are fine with mandarins
As for a set-up:
-Go for a 20g. Trust me. You will want to upgrade within 3 months if you have a 10g.
-Plan on some corals. It will happen.
-Use a sump if you can. IMO they're cheaper and more effective than the hobby filters with more flexibility in what you can do with them. You can make it into a sump/refugium and crank out pods from there as well.
-On a tank this size you can get away without a skimmer if you are good about your water changes. I ran a very packed 20g with just water changes (10 to 25%) and a aquaclear HOB filter for a good 8 months very successfully before upgrading to a very packed 40g with a skimmer.
-Don't get a maroon goldstrip clownfish. They're a$$holes.
Over all, it is possible to keep a mandarin in a smaller tank; you just need to go about it smartly and be prepared that you might have some "hiccups" along the way. When looking for information on how to do things in reef aquariums you will find that you can ask two different reefers on how to do something and you'll get three different opinions. Do your homework, make your own informed decisions and come up with a plan to achieve what you want. I do (or have done) a lot of things that people say don't work or I can't do but I have done them with success.
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