by Johnny Cycles, December 19th, 2025

Hello! Welcome to another edition of Keeping Modern Janky! This week, I’m playing a deck inspired by my Ob Nixilis, Captive Kingpin deck in Commander. However, the central idea of the deck also happens to coincide with a new mythic from Avatar: The Last Airbender – Phoenix Fleet Airship.

I can’t take any credit for discovering this card. I didn’t have it on my top 10 cards for Modern list, nor even on my radar. I dismissed it as another overcosted vehicle that was more about the flavor than playability.

But boy was I wrong!

The origin of this deck, however, started before Avatar was even spoiled. It began when I first resolved a Twisted Fealty in a Commander game, stole my opponent’s best creature, attacked, then sacrificed it for value. I don’t consider myself a bad person, but this was intoxicating! Sure, killing your opponent’s best creature is great. But taking it and using it first before killing it is so much better!

Of course, three mana to steal a creature is a lot in Modern, particularly if we need mana to then sacrifice it, but then I remembered this card:

Modern is full of super powerful creatures that happen to cost three mana or less. Could we possibly build a deck around Claim the Firstborn, Twisted Fealty (and friends), and a bunch of sac outlets that could compete in Modern?

I didn’t find out the answer until after Phoenix Fleet Airship was released, but this card makes our deck so much better!

Here’s the decklist:

Decklist – Rakdos Steal and Sac with Phoenix Fleet Airship

by Johnny Cycles
Format: Modern

Creatures (16)

4 Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer
4 Shambling Ghast
4 Orcish Bowmasters
4 Umbral Collar Zealot

Artifacts (4)

4 Phoenix Fleet Airship

Spells (17)

4 Claim the Firstborn
2 Corrupted Conviction
3 Lightning Bolt
2 Village Rites
3 Bloody Betrayal
3 Twisted Fealty

Lands (23)

1 Blood Crypt
4 Bloodstained Mire
1 Castle Locthwain
3 Field of Ruin
2 Mountain
4 Phyrexian Tower
2 Raucous Theater
4 Swamp
1 Verdant Catacombs
1 Wooded Foothills

Sideboard (15)

2 Meltdown
4 Damping Sphere
2 Brotherhood’s End
1 Damnation
2 Flare of Malice
4 Leyline of the Void

Deck Tech

Primary Game Plan

We want to steal our opponent’s best creature, attack with it, then sacrifice it, either with a permanent that requires no mana investment, or with Corrupted Conviction or Village Rites to keep our hand full of more steal spells. With that in mind, we want to make land drops until about turn 5, stick a permanent sac outlet along the way, and start stealing creatures. We can steal and sac as early as turn 1.

How?

If our opponent plays a turn 1 Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, we can play a Mountain, steal the Monkey Pirate with Claim the Firstborn, then cast Corrupted Conviction off of the Treasure token we get to sacrifice it and draw two cards. Pretty sweet!

Of course, this won’t happen very often, even if Ragavan is still heavily played in Modern.

More realistically, we want to play a turn 2 Umbral Collar Zealot, then cast one of our steal spells on turn 3. This will allow us to surveil into more action, hopefully.

This is by far our most aggressive start and one that I can’t take any credit for discovering. An opponent of mine got double Phoenix Fleet Airships on the back of a turn 1 Shambling Ghast and a turn 2 Phyrexian Tower. I also know that Aspiring Spike has a Mono Black deck with these cards, as well. That being said, this is a super fun, super powerful start for our deck.

Follow that turn up with an Orcish Bowmasters, and opponents will likely be dead very quickly.

A word about Orcish Bowmasters. Yes, Wizards has printed a bunch of 1-mana creatures with 2 toughness, which has resulted in a dip in frequency of play of this former Modern all-star. But the two bodies it brings that can then crew two copies of Phoenix Fleet Airship is where this card really shines in our deck.

Furthermore, now that people haven’t been running into this card as much, there are more targets it can pick off with its enters ability. Add to this how many decks in Modern want to draw a bunch of cards every turn, and Orcish Bowmasters is still really good.

Finally, we can also sacrifice the token it brings with it to make more mana, surveil, and/or make another copy of Phoenix Fleet Airship, should we not need it to crew. All in all, this card is at its best in our deck.

With so many 3-mana steal spells to choose from, I went with Twisted Fealty and Bloody Betrayal. The former deals an extra two damage when it’s all said and done, while the latter synergizes very nicely with Phoenix Fleet Airship. The Blood token we get after sacrificing the creature we steal gives us another permanent we can sac at our leisure when we have nothing else to trigger the Airship. The card filtering is nice, as well.

Hijack is in the sideboard of some of my matches. It can certainly stay there or be considered as a main-deck steal spell, especially if there are a lot of Phoenix Fleet Airship decks in your meta. The double in its casting cost is what initially turned me off of the card, but I don’t think that’s quite the hindrance I made it out to be.

Meanwhile, Kari Zev’s Expertise is a powerful way to do two things in a turn in the right spot, but I’m not sure how often we’ll be able to take advantage of that second block of text. Finally, Furnace Reins is the same as Bloody Betrayal except we get a Treasure token instead of a Blood token. Really, it’s up to you which steal spells strike your fancy the most. They each bring something to the table worth considering.

We also have options when it comes to our sac outlets. Viscera Seer comes down on turn 1, which can be super important when we want to cast Claim the Firstborn on turn 2. However, it dies so easily and doesn’t really offer a serious clock.

Umbral Collar Zealot, meanwhile, gives us a respectable beater. More importantly, though, is it allows us to sacrifice artifacts to surveil. There will be times when we have extra copies of Phoenix Fleet Airship on the battlefield and need creatures to crew them. Sacrificing one of the copies to dig for a creature is really useful, not to mention that this will trigger the Airship and replace the copy we sacrificed.

This ability gets even better should you play a card like Hijack.

The number of draw spells fluctuates over the course of my matches. Their allure is obvious. There is something particularly satisfying about stealing your opponent’s creature and sacrificing it to draw cards.

Still, there were a few games when I drew four or five copies of these cards with no creature to sacrifice. Brutal. Four total copies is where I settled, though I think going to five may be worthwhile. We need cheap/free sac outlets and a way to keep our hand full of action (or lands, as the case may be), and these instants are great at doing this.

Sideboard

Early versions of the deck featured the above three cards. Obviously, stealing a creature to sacrifice it to kill another of our opponent’s creatures is quite the fun, but I found that the card was too unimpactful in the match-ups we needed removal in. Our deck struggles against go-wide strategies, as our steal spells are generally less effective when our opponent has a bunch of creatures out. Thus, spot removal is not our best answer in those situations.

Leyline of the Void is my preferred graveyard hate card, but then I realized that the unfair graveyard decks looking to reanimate a big fatty is exactly what our deck is built to prey on. We want that big fatty in play so that we can steal it. Of course, there are other graveyard decks, so it might be worthwhile making room for some form of graveyard hate.

In their places, I brought in a few sweepers and two copies of Flare of Malice, which is a nice answer to Tron’s big finishers.

Otherwise, four copies of Damping Sphere and three copies of Cleansing Wildfire are good at slowing down Tron and Amulet Titan, as well as giving us an answer to Urza’s Saga outside of our Field of Ruins. Meltdown is for Affinity, mostly.

And that’s the deck! Now let’s get to the game play!

Match 1 vs. Eldrazi Tron

Match 2 vs. Broodscale Combo

Match 3 vs. Burn

Match 4 vs. Dimir Delver

Match 5 vs. Tron

Match 6 vs. Legendary Tribal

Match 7 vs. Domain Zoo

Match 8 vs. Grixis Reanimator

Overall Record: 3-5

We won one other match against a Bant Spirits deck, but the sound didn’t record… We also lost several other matches that didn’t add much to the overall representation of the deck and its functionality seen in what I’ve posted, so I left them out.

I honestly expected a better record going in to the games, but in hindsight, I can see why we lost as much as we did.

Impressions from Game Play

I’ve never gotten so consistently mana screwed with a single deck in my life! It happened so much that I made a compilation video of it…

Still, when we drew lands and spells in a normal sequence, the deck was a lot of fun to play. It feels like it can compete with some of the top decks out there. And, in several of our games in which we only made 2 land drops, we were still in a spot to win with the right draw. That says something, I think.

The deck struggles against Control and go-wide aggressive strategies. Burn is also a big problem.

Our sideboard is geared towards fighting the Aggro strategies, as well as big mana decks and Storm, but we don’t have a whole lot against Burn and Control. We’re mainly hoping to dodge those match-ups, or at least play versions of those decks that feature more creatures up the curve.

Phoenix Fleet Airship is a super powerful card and our deck is well positioned to make copies of it and to crew them. Our steal spells were really fun and really powerful against a lot of strategies. Other times, they just couldn’t keep up with what our opponent was doing.

I think there are two drawbacks to this deck, other than the fact that we’re a combo deck that needs multiple pieces to function. First, we have a greater potential to draw dead cards than most decks. If our opponent isn’t playing many creatures or if we don’t have a sac outlet, then our steal spells will either be useless or unimpactful. Our draw spells can also rot in our hand for similar reasons.

Similarly, most of our creatures are not inherently powerful. Umbral Collar Zealot can hit for 3, but that’s often not very impressive in the late game. Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer is a super powerful card, but it is easily answered early and easily blocked late. Thus, if we are missing combo pieces, then our creatures don’t present a very fast clock by themselves, even on an empty board. This means our opponents will have plenty of time to execute their game plan, which will typically be more powerful than our own.

Second, being dependent on our opponent’s creatures makes for some odd game play. I describe it in the deck tech as wandering lost in the woods. This may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but we are a very reactive deck in this regard. We need our opponent to play good creatures so that we can win, rather than our deck having them. This is, of course, inherent to our strategy, but it can lead to us doing nothing for too long to win.

All that being said, the deck had some spectacular moments. From making 8+ copies of Phoenix Fleet Airship, to stealing our opponent’s Emrakul, the Promised End and swinging for lethal with it, we got to live our dream enough to make the deck fun to play.

Conclusion

Even though we’re playing a new hot mythic in Phoenix Fleet Airship, our deck is really all about stealing our opponent’s creatures for value. It is a ton of fun when it works! So, if you’re like me and want to use your opponent’s creatures to kill them, give this deck a chance! I promise, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.

Thanks for reading and watching! Let me know in the comments what you think. Am I forgetting any steal cards? Sac outlets? Finishers?