Fighting Chance

A combat trick that asks you to gamble on the outcome rather than buy it outright, and the design tells you exactly how Wizards felt about randomness in 1998: it was a punchline. The math is the joke. Against one blocker you are a coin away from pushing your attacker through clean; against a real wall of defenders, the odds of winning every flip collapse fast, which means the card is least reliable precisely when the opponent has committed the most bodies to stopping you. Crucially, this is an offensive tool, not a fog: it only prevents damage dealt by blocking creatures, so it does nothing to save you on defense. What it does is protect your attackers from a multi-block, turning a doomed alpha strike into a possible one and letting the dice decide which of your creatures survives. It belongs to the small tradition of coin-flip red cards (Mijae Djinn, the later Krark designs) where the variance is the flavor and the payoff is the story you tell afterward. The single red mana is a deliberate cost discount baked into uncertainty, the same lever that made other red gambles cheap: you pay less because the effect might not happen. It is a relic of a design philosophy that has since narrowed coin flips to a tightly curated novelty, but it remains a clean snapshot of what red's "high risk" slot looked like before the color's chaos was systematized.