Olivia, Crimson Bride Deck Tech: Serana, Daughter of Coldharbour

This is my Olivia, Crimson Bride deck tech, and I'm going to give it to you straight: Serana, Daughter of Coldharbour is a Rakdos reanimator deck that turns a stocked graveyard into free 6-, 7-, and 8-drops every combat, and its recorded record is 7 wins in 24 games. The ceiling is one of the highest in our pod. The floor is the reason for that record. Both halves belong in an honest Magic: The Gathering deck tech, so here are both.

Olivia, Crimson Bride costs for a 3/4 with flying and haste, and every time she attacks she returns a creature card from my graveyard to the battlefield tapped and attacking. The returned creature carries an exile clause tied to me controlling a legendary Vampire, so as long as Olivia sticks around, the creature does too.

That text turns the deck into a two-step machine. Step one: put expensive creatures into the graveyard as fast as possible. Step two: attack, and let Olivia cheat them into play mid-combat, already swinging. No mana paid, no summoning sickness, no waiting a turn cycle. The rate is absurd but the catch is that everything hinges on the attack actually happening.

Eighteen cards in this list exist to put creatures in the bin, and they're mostly cheap red draw-discard: Faithless Looting, Cathartic Reunion, Thrill of Possibility, Seize the Spoils, and friends. I tagged them all as graveyard fill because that's their job. The card draw is how I keep hitting land drops while I do it.

The premium versions are the tutors. Buried Alive puts three creatures of my choice straight into the graveyard, which is functionally a triple tutor for this deck. Entomb and Unmarked Grave do it for one target at instant or near-instant speed. Doom Whisperer is one of the best cards in the deck. Pay life, surveil, and fill the yard as deep as I'm willing to bleed for it. In one recorded win I paid 16 life surveilling with it, wiped the board, and closed the game off a full graveyard.

The deck's cleanest wins come from stacking damage multipliers. Twinflame Tyrant doubles the damage my sources deal; Bloodletter of Aclazotz doubles the life opponents lose on my turn. Reanimate both and a modest attack becomes a funeral. That exact pairing has closed multiple recorded games. Adam's table reaction after one of them was, verbatim, wondering where all the damage doublers came from.

The support cast leans the same direction. Necropolis Regent grows the whole team, Balefire Dragon and Summon: Bahamut are reanimation targets that double as removal, and Moraug, Fury of Akoum, Port Razer, and Raphael, Tag Team Tough grant extra combat steps, which means extra Olivia triggers, which means extra free creatures. Breath of Fury plus Port Razer is the all-in line: with the right board it chains combat steps indefinitely.

When the board does get wiped, Living Death is the trap card. Grande cast a Blasphemous Act into it once and handed me the game. My whole graveyard came back and the resulting pile ran the table over.

The deck runs 35 lands with 23 black and 20 red sources against a nearly even pip split, backed by Sol Ring, Arcane Signet, the Rakdos signet-and-talisman pair, and Thran Dynamo to bridge to Olivia's six-mana cast. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth plus Cabal Coffers is the payoff package, and Shizo, Death's Storehouse gives Olivia fear so the attack trigger actually connects. If you want to see where a list like this lands on power level, run it through the bracket calculator.

Sequencing rule one: don't cast Olivia into open mana. She's the whole deck — every reanimated creature is tied to her, so a kill spell in response to her attack trigger can undo two turns of work. The sacrifice outlets, Ashnod's Altar and Goblin Bombardment, are the insurance: if Olivia is dying anyway, I sacrifice the reanimated creatures back into the graveyard where she can fetch them again later, instead of losing them to exile.

Rule two: this deck rewards aggressive keeps. My best recorded win came off a one-land hand kept because it had Reanimate and Ozai, the Phoenix King in it — a gamble that built a board state out of nothing.

Seven wins in 24 games is below rate, and the losses have a shape. Control is the worst matchup on record. One game log reads two overloaded Cyclonic Rifts and five counterspells, and there's nothing a combat-trigger deck does about that. Fast combo kills before the engine assembles. And the deck telegraphs: everyone in our league knows to be skeptical of my graveyard by now, so Olivia eats removal on sight.

But the wins are massacres, not squeakers. When the yard is stocked and Olivia connects even twice, the damage math ends games on the spot. That variance is the deck: a 29% win rate with a top-three ceiling in the pod.

Want to see what infinite lines are hiding in your own list? Paste it into the Nerd Leagues Combo Finder, or browse other players' builds in the public deck explorer — and if your pod isn't tracking wins and losses yet, that's the only way you'll ever know what your deck actually does.