Against the Odds: Phoenix Fleet Airship (Standard)
Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Against the Odds! This week we're heading to Avatar Standard to see if we can win with one of the spiciest and most unique cards in the set: Phoenix Fleet Airship! By itself Phoenix Fleet Airship is fine, at 4/4 flying vehicle for four with crew 1, but it gets much more exciting once we start sacrificing stuff, because as long as we sacrifice something during our turn our Phoenix Fleet Airship will make a copy of itself on our end step, and once we get eight on the battlefield they all become creatures, allowing us to win with a single attack! I have to say that I love the design of the card, the way the ships keep multiplying really does make it feel like a massive enemy fleet is on the horizon, getting closer and more menacing turn by turn, until it eventually overwhelms your defenses and wins the game! Can the plan work? How hard is it to get eight Phoenix Fleet Airships on the battlefield? Let's get to the video and find out!
Against the Odds: Phoenix Fleet Airship
The Deck
Our goal today is simple: make as many Phoenix Fleet Airships as possible as quickly as possible. Thankfully, doing this isn't super hard, because once we get one Airship on the battlefield it will copy itself on our end step as long as we sacrificed at least one thing during our turn. While we can potentially win fairly by crewing up our Phoenix Fleet Airships with our creatures, once we get eight of them on the battlefield we don't need to worry about that anymore, because they'll all turn themselves into creatures! Unfortunately this happens most often on our end step, so we have to wait a turn to actually win with the fleet, although we have a couple of tricks to potentially speed things up.
Outside of actually winning with eight Phoenix Fleet Airships, the primary goal of our deck is to play a Phoenix Fleet Airship on turn three while also sacrificing a permanent. This makes two-mana Treasure makers like Charming Scoundrel and Generous Plunderer especially important to the deck. We can play one on turn two, make a Treasure and on turn three sac that Treasure to ramp into Phoenix Fleet Airship and even get a free copy of it on our end step!
While not as straightforward, we can also pull this off with a Greedy Freebooter on turn one and a way to sacrifice it on turn two, like Fanatical Offering or Umbral Collar Zealot, which let us sacrifice Greedy Freebooter, make a Treasure to ramp our Phoenix Fleet Airship on turn three to start making copies.
While getting down a Phoenix Fleet Airship and copying it on turn three is nice, it's also not enough. To actually get eight copies on the battlefield we need to be able to sacrifice something for three turns, so we can double one copy to two, two to four, and four to eight, at which point we (hopefully) win the game. As such, we've got cards like Infestation Sage that we can sacrifice multiple times, Chandra, Spark Hunter to sacrifice random artifacts and also crew our airships in a pinch, and even a chunk of our removal is artifact-based in Grim Bauble and Tithing Blade, because unlike Heartless Act and Shoot the Sheriff (which we also have a few copies of), we can sacrifice them to make more airships.
I mentioned earlier that we had a trick to speeding up the Phoenix Fleet Airship kill. Well, the last part of our deck is Popular Egotist and Sawblade Skinripper, which deal damage (or make our opponent lose life) equal to the number of cards we sacrifice. While these cards play fine when played fairly, generating some incidental value as we sacrifice things, while also giving us backup sacrifice outlets if we don't draw Umbral Collar Zealot, they also give us some combo kill potential. We can make a bunch of Phoenix Fleet Airships on our end step and immediately sacrifice them all to something like Umbral Collar Zealot to burn our opponent out of the game directly without having to wait until the following turn to win by attacking with our airship fleet.
Wrap Up
Record-wise, the deck won just about 50% of the time, which is fine. More importantly, Phoenix Fleet Airship felt surprisingly solid, especially if you are willing to build around it. While we did pick up several wins by making eight copies of Phoenix Fleet Airship, I was surprised how good the vehicle was when we just crewed it up and attacked with it fairly. We managed to win several games with just two or four airships. It turns out a 4/4 flying crew 1 vehicle is actually a pretty solid threat!
Conclusion
Anyway, that's all for today. As always, leave your thoughts, ideas, opinions and suggestions in the comments, and you can reach me on Twitter @SaffronOlive, or at SaffronOlive@MTGGoldfish.com.
