Olivia, Mobilized for War | Eric Deschamps

Technically Playable - Olivia, Mobilized for War

Welcome to Technically Playable, where our mission statement is "Every commander is Technically playable" (the best kind of playable). The way this works is every article will have a commander generated using EDHREC's random button, I'll talk through the card and then write about how we can build around it!

This week's random commander is Olivia, Mobilized for War.

For me Olivia, Mobilized for War has always been a "but why?" commander. If you want to play vampires, use Edgar Markov or Olivia Voldaren. If you want to play a madness deck Anje Falkenrath is wildly broken, and even came with most of the deck as a precon and if you want to go for reanimator... Well, that's an article all by itself. That was until I realized, that this iteration of Olivia gives haste, fills up your graveyard, and enables madness creating an awesome, cheap commander for any of these decks while giving you the option to mix and match them as you want (ignore Chainer, Nightmare Adept, he came out 3 years later).

Gotta Go Fast!

The thing that I think separates Olivia (and yes, Chainer too) from a lot of the graveyard-centric decks that people play, is access to haste. What really makes Olivia stand out is that the card you give haste doesn't have to have come from your graveyard. This means that you can get around some graveyard hate like Rest in Peace and Leyline of the Void that can completely hose most decks with a graveyard element to them. While she has been overshadowed (at least in my playgroup) by her newer iteration, I still love Etali, Primal Storm in decks that can enable haste. I play her in my Xenagos, God of Revels deck. I even remember building an Etali deck a while ago as the ability to consistently play her, give haste, and attack on the same turn gets you a ton of value while mostly getting around her biggest weakness, which is her lack of protection. While Etali does have the potential to miss, you have a lot of other options to get tons of value from Olivia's haste-enabling.

Neheb, Dreadhorde Champion works in this deck in a couple of different ways; in terms of haste, he is a moderately cheap trampling beater that allows you to cycle through cards in your hand while also gaining mana to cast the new cards that you play. I think this version of Neheb is incredibly underrated, mostly because, similarly to Etali, the lack of protection or haste means that he is very susceptible to board wipes or spot removal. By giving Neheb haste from Olivia's ability, you can reduce the number of opportunities your opponents have to interact with Neheb before getting some value out of him. On the pricier end of the scale, you can also use the ancient dragons from Battle for Baldur's Gate to take advantage of the immediate attacks.

Ancient Copper Dragon gives you access to a lot of mana that Rakdos decks otherwise struggle to get easily and unlike Old Gnawbone, since it's random, it's (a little bit) less of a target. This mana is important as it allows you to hardcast the expensive reanimation targets that you'll probably have in your deck. It'll also give you a way to play around graveyard hate and the ability to get those creatures into play with haste from Olivia's ability. If you want to go down a dragon-y route with a little bit of a graveyard focus, Dragon Mage is another fantastic card with haste and gives you another creature that can help you to fuel the graveyard or to dig into reanimation spells or removal when you need it. It's three more mana than Neheb but also ensures you will draw seven cards at the cost of a little red mana. Personally, I'd probably just run both.

Get in (or out of) the bin

Being Rakdos colors, Olivia, Mobilized for War has access to a lot of options when it comes to graveyard strategies. The ability to discard cards also gives you an answer to the tricky issue of drawing the reanimation targets that you can sometimes have in these kinds of decks. I have a lot of experience with reanimator decks and often find that in Commander, they struggle with the same issue that aggro decks do. In 60-card constructed formats, often being able to reanimate one sticky or impactful threat is enough to win a game. The number of Legacy games I've won off reanimating a Griselbrand and generating enough value to overwhelm my opponent or even an Inkwell Leviathan because of the lack of boardwipes in the format is more than I can count. The issue with Commander is two-fold; firstly, there are a lot more boardwipes so reanimating something with Hexproof or Shroud doesn't necessarily guarantee it will stick around. In addition, the number of players with interaction and the amount of damage you need to deal with is much higher, so makes even a big threat much slower at closing out the game. To get around that, I often like to have cards that will create a board state in one go. In the early days of Commander this was often Grave Titan since it would generate two additional bodies and if it got to attack it would quickly overwhelm the other players. I still think Grave Titan is good, especially with a commander like Olivia that gives it haste. I also like Bladewing, Deathless Tyrant, as it not only has built-in haste in case Olivia is not around but it also creates a huge threatening board state when it connects.

As mentioned above, the ancient dragon cycle is amazing and the copper dragon isn't the only one you can run here. The Ancient Brass Dragon is also incredibly powerful and can also create an entire board state in a single swing. The best part of Ancient Brass Dragon is that it doesn't specify a graveyard, allowing you to grab any creatures you want from your opponent's graveyards if yours is running a little low. This works really well in combination with Breach the Multiverse, allowing you to easily fill up your board with powerful creatures in a single combat set.

In terms of filling up the graveyard initially, of course, you can use Olivia's discard ability, but this only triggers when a creature enters the battlefield. You need some other ways to make sure your graveyard has a healthy supply of creatures. Wheel of Fortune/Wheel of Misfortune are great options, but I have recently found that any abilities attached to creatures are often stronger since they are much easier to recur. Magus of the Wheel is a great option that takes advantage of Olivia's haste ability and it gives you an option to reanimate with cards like Unearth and only deals three damage to you with Reanimate. Sadly if you don't have Olivia out the magus may be too slow but I am also a fan of Runehorn Hellkite since it gives you the option to activate it in the graveyard if you accidentally mill it as well as giving you something you want in the graveyard to discard with Olivia.

Going Mad

But discarding isn't only good for reanimating. You're playing vampires and vampires are known for... Madness (I guess?). As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, while Anje Falkenrath is probably the best madness commander, and you should probably run her in your Olivia deck anyway, the ability on Olivia, Mobilized for War to discard cards does open you up to some cool Madness interaction and even the ability to chain a bunch of creatures together if you have enough mana.

Probably the best payoff for any discard-focused deck is Bone Miser. A kind of reverse Waste Not, Bone Miser gives you a ton of resources that allow you to chain discards together by giving you the mana and cards to continuously discard anything with Madness while continuing to refuel your hand and mana. What is also quite funny is that if you discard a creature Bone Miser will make you a zombie that will trigger Olivia and allow you to discard more cards. In combination with Surly Badgersaur Bone Miser will enable some really weird and powerful turns that will hopefully end in a board full of haste-y creatures.

In terms of actual creatures with Madness the quality can vary significantly, ranging from cards like Big Game Hunter and Shadowgrange Archfiend all of the way to Bloodmad Vampire and Brain Gorgers. The main difference between a deck like Olivia and Anje Falkenrath is the need for these madness cards. While Anje needs the Madness creatures to have the powerful turns you can use Olivia to generate value by discarding and casting the creatures with madness to allow you to discard other more powerful cards to reanimate. Additionally cards like Grave Scrabbler and Terminal Agony give you good value and utility while also giving your more powerful creatures haste to get their powerful effects to trigger.

I think while Olivia, Mobilized for War is not the most powerful Vampire, Madness or Reanimator deck it is really cool to look at the different options you have available to you when building a Commander deck. What I really like about Olivia is the huge range of potential archetypes she works with which is reflected on her EDHREC page where people have used her to helm 10 different archetypes.

As with all Technically Playable articles, this was a very quick look at Olivia, Mobilized for War as a commander and a few of the cards that can really make a deck with Olivia as the commander tick.

Let me know in the comments below if you play Olivia, Mobilized for War, if you want to build an Olivia, Mobilized for War deck, or even if you just enjoyed this article!

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Paul Palmer

Hey there, I'm Paul. I've been writing about magic for a really long time. I love to write about obscure commanders (one of my really early articles back in 2015 was about Skeleton Ship) and how you can make decks around them work, no matter how unplayable they are. I love Gruul, I love Mountains and I love casting Lightning Bolt.