Pointed Discussion

Could somebody post a ruling on this? I saw that this card recently got restricted/banned because it combo's well with another card (can't remember the other card). The other card would get counters on it for every coin flip you win and then after so many counters you win the game. Does this mean you can activate the ability on this card in response to itself as many times as you want? Every coin flip would go through regardless of the result? Can someone help me?

P.S.- The other card is Chance Encounter

You can activate the ability as many times as you want, and if you win at least 10 of the 9001 or however many flips you declare, Chance Encounter will allow you to win the game.

Chance encounter decks are bombastic.

Don't think that works. Look at the ruling for Frenetic Sliver, which gives all Slivers exactly the same ability:
"For any given Sliver, this ability can be activated numerous times in response to itself, but the end result is that only one coin will be flipped for that Sliver."
So it looks like you'd only get to flip the coin once every two turns at best.

It works. Frenetic Sliver specifies that you only flip the coin if the sliver is still in play. This does not. Besides, if you're running Chance Encounter, you deserve to win with a two card combo :P

"While it's phased out, it's treated as though it doesn't exist"

I lol'd

The only creature that dodges removal better than this guy is Norin the Wary. You gotta give this guy an A for effort. When you try to target him with a spell, he either jumps out of the way or kills himself doing it!

oh,
Frenetic Efreet
This card got power-level errata when Chance Encounter was printed in Odyssey. Frenetic Efreet lets you play its activated ability as many times as you want in response to itself (since the cost is just ). When the first such ability resolved, you'd flip a coin and Frenetic Efreet would go away (either to the graveyard or the phased-out zone). According to Frenetic Efreet's original wording, all the rest of the abilities would still resolve, causing you to flip a coin each time. Nothing would happen to Frenetic Efreet (it's gone by now), but you'd get the easy opportunity to win lots of irrelevant coin flips and put plenty of luck counters on Chance Encounter, allowing you to win the game when your next upkeep started. To combat this combo, and the otherwise pointless free coin-flipping this card facilitated, Frenetic Efreet got errata stating that you flipped the coin only if it was in play.

In keeping with our current policy regarding power-level errata, the Efreet is going back to its printed functionality. If this proves to be broken (and it ain't no Flash), it'll be addressed with bannings and/or restrictions.

New Oracle wording:
Flying
{o0}: Flip a coin. If you win the flip, Frenetic Efreet phases out. If you lose the flip, sacrifice Frenetic Efreet.

http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/35b&page=2

If someone plays Chance Encounter and Frenetic Efreet together, and then puts one googol coin flips on the stack, be so kind as to make them actually resolve all of them to win.

i once used it with chance encounter, since i there was a judge present he said i had to name a # so i said 100 and my friend made me do all of them and i lost all of the flips:(((((( worst luck ever

Whats the point of the coin flip if you can keep flipping until you win?

@ Saxican - I find that very hard to believe, the odds of flipping tails 100 times in a row are 1 over 1,267,650,600,288,229,401,469,703,205,376 (That's over 1.2 Nonillion).

So I think I'm gonna have to call bullsh*t on that one. ;)

Oh, hi Frenetic Efreet, fancy seeing you here...

Protip: Your opponent cannot legally make you resolve surplus flips. Call a judge; they'll get a slow play warning. (They can make you flip the coin enough times to actually get to 10 successes, or whatever number you specify, but c'mon, if you play Chance Encounter combo you were probably wanting to do that anyway.)

And yeah, for a while, Wizards errata'd the *** out of Frenetic Efreet precisely so that that particular combo didn't work. Then after both cards were safely in eternal formats only, they un-errata'd. Hence all the confusion about whether the combo works -- legions of players heard of the errataing (erratanification?) but didn't hear about the much less talked-about unerrataing.

It would've made more sense to just ban one of 'em, but back then, Wizards wasn't into making sense. :)