A lot of things in life come down to a coin flip. Left or right? Who receives first in a football game? Taco Bell or McDonald’s?Magic: The Gatheringgets in on the randomized action too. In a game already dense with variance, coin-flip cards can make matches even more chaotic. They’re the gambler’s dream and the statistician’s nightmare.
Coin-flipping as a mechanic is rarely used in Magic design, but it makes for good story moments, and therefore sneaks its way onto the occasional card. Entire Commander decks are built around these 50/50 chances, and the best coin-flip cards are usually seen played together in the same decks.
10Chance Encounter
A Game-Winner, If You’re Lucky
Chance Encounter offers the coin-flip deck analternate win condition. Not a reliable one though, given that it’s really only effective in games where you’re already winning your coin flips anyway, in which case you’re probably doing fine without this enchantment.
Thematic inclusion aside, Chance Encounter is expensive and doesn’t actually do anything useful if it’s not literally winning you the game. Add to that the fact that you have to make it to your next upkeep once you’ve fulfilled the condition, and it’s pretty clear this card is bait. Points for fun and flavor though.
9Ral Zarek
Walking Planes, Flipping Coins
The original iteration of Ral Zarek has a powerful coin-flipping effect that usually results ina few extra turns, but it comes up very rarely. Planeswalkers don’t stick around in Commander that often, especially ones that need to survive three or more turns to use their ultimate.
Of course, you could just cheese the last ability. Witha few proliferate effectsor another method of stacking up loyalty counters, Ral can pop off in just a few turns, and he’s likely to refund at least a few of those turns right away.
8Goblin Assassin
Can You Guess Its Creature Types?
There are two main homes for Goblin Assassin. The first is the obvious coin-flip deck, where you’ll have a little more control over its effect. You’ll want to surround it with other token-making coin-flip cards like Molten Rebirth and Mirror March in this build.
The other equally obvious, and perhaps better home isa Goblin typal deck. Goblin decks specialize in flooding the board, which means this Gobbo Assassin will trigger very often and keep most boards clear. You’ll also have more fodder to sacrifice, unlike the coin-flip deck, which can be light on actual board presence.
7Stitch In Time
It’s All Or Nothing
Three mana for an extra turn is enticing, but three mana to throw away a card with no effect is unacceptable. But hey, it’s the perfect card for those among you who just want to play the odds.
You might consider Stitch in Time for decks that frequently copy or rebuy spells. You’ll still be subjected to a coin-flip on every Stitch you cast or copy, but you’re bound to win a few flips if you just cast the card enough times. You could just as easily run a normal extra turn spell, but that’s not nearly as fun.
6Yusri, Fortune’s Flame
The Second-Place Coin-Flip Commander
Yusri’s most commonly found within Okaun and Zndrsplt decks, where its mass coin-flipping ability greatly benefits those two commanders. Either way, Yusri plays the odds like any other coin-flip card, and even gives the player some agency in how effective (or detrimental) it might be.
It’s a 1/32 chance for the big payoff, so you probably shouldn’t bank on flipping Yahtzee very often. Still, as long as you have some life to spare, you can crank up the number of flips each turn, sometimes taking some damage, sometimes getting a nicecard drawpayout.
Yusri requires that you actually win a coin flip. Some cards like Two-Headed Giant don’t require you to call the coin toss, so none of the results count as winning the flip.
5Frenetic Efreet + Frenetic Sliver
Near-Infinite Flippers
Frenetic Sliver was designed as a direct callback to Frenetic Efreet, with updated rules text. Interestingly, the majority of the text on the Frenetic twins hardly matters; all you really care about is flipping an arbitrary number of coins using these cards' free-to-activate abilities.
The trick isholding priorityand activating them as many times as you’d like in succession. Once you have, say, 500 coin flip activations on the stack, pass priority and let them resolve. You don’t care what happens to the permanent, but you’ll get all the coin flips you could possibly need.
4Tavern Scoundrel
Win-Win If You Play Your Cards Right
Tavern Scoundrel’s not quite as feast-or-famine as some coin-flip cards. Sure, if you lose the flip, you’re basically down a permanent, but you can circumvent that a bit by weaving this into a deck that actively wants to sacrifice permanents. Something playing Marionette Master or Mayhem Devil, perhaps.
And the upside’s actually pretty good fora dinky little commonlike this. A single winning coin toss usually produces enough material to keep the ability going on future turns, andTreasure’s a pretty good reward in and of itself.
Tavern Scoundrel was designed as a riff on Tavern Swindler, another coin-flip card with a much less impressive reward for winning the flip.
3Krark’s Thumb
The Rabbit’s Foot Of Magic
Krark’s Thumb is the absolute most important card for any coin-flip deck. It gives you a second shot at nailing your flips, making it twice as likely that any given flip ends up in your favor. It also just gives you extra flips for cards that care about how many coins you’re flipping, even if you’re not interested in the results.
This card is so critical to this archetype that you’ll often run multipletutor effectsin your deck just to find it. Tribute Mage, Fabricate, and, appropriately, Gamble become must-plays when your deck’s in need of the Thumb.
2Okaun, Eye Of Chaos + Zndrsplt, Eye Of Wisdom
The Reason You’re Here
Why is it whenever something involves coin flips it’s always you two? That’s how the quote goes, right? Anyway, with one eye each, Okaun and Zndrsplt form a two-eyed tag-team coin-flipping Commander deck that surpasses any other commander(s) you could run for this strategy.
The Homonculus provides card advantage, the Cyclops brings the brawn, and together they smash your opponents and fuel all your other coin-flip payoffs. They also benefit from other coin-flip cards, even your opponents', making these legends the quintessential coin-flippartner pairing.
1Mana Crypt
Well, It Does In Fact Flip A Coin
Calling Mana Crypt a “coin-flip card” is cheating to some extent. Yes, it flips a coin, but that’s pretty irrelevant given how absurdly strong thismana rockis. The result of the coin-flip matters, but Mana Crypt’s obviously operating in a completely different space from most other coin-flip cards.
One of the original sins of Commander, Crypt was deemed legal from the format’s onset, despite being clearly overpowered relative to most other mana accelerants. What’s done is done, just know that putting Mana Crypt in your casual coin-flip deck meaningfully raises the power level of your deck.
