Riftbound Riven Deck: Sithis's 9-0-1 List, Card by Card

TL;DR: RAD-149RAD-149Shop on TCGplayer Riven's Legend, The Exile, makes units you play to battlefields you control enter ready. The deck is built around cards that do something when they get exhausted, like RAD-043RAD-043Shop on TCGplayer Riven, Broken Blade and RAD-105RAD-105Shop on TCGplayer Reckless Innovator. All nine lists ran three Reckless Innovator and three RAD-150RAD-150Shop on TCGplayer Blade of the Exile. Blade is foil-only and costs about $38 a copy on TCGplayer (October 31).

Image credit: Riot Games via the official Riftbound card gallery (RAD-043, RAD-149, RAD-150).

Sithis's Riven list, 1st of 74, 9-0-1

From the Showdown 5 standings on riftbound.gg. The last column is how many of the 9 Riven lists at the event ran the card.

Runes: 6 Calm, 6 Chaos. Battlefields: Hunters' Circle, Emperor's Dais, Star Spring. riftbound.gg also lists 10 sideboard cards: two An Offer You Can't Refuse, two Ravenbloom Prefect, and one each of Gust, Abandon, Star-Crossed, Baron Nashor, Akali, Silent and Angler Beast.

The Main Deck is 40 cards counting Riven, Broken Blade, who starts the game in the Champion Zone rather than in the deck. Three Blade of the Exile is the most you can play: the Core Rules cap a deck at 3 Signature cards for a champion.

What the Riven Legend changes

Riot's text for The Exile is one line: "Units you play to battlefields you control enter ready." Normally, the Core Rules say, "Units enter the Board exhausted." And a unit's standard move costs exactly that: "Exhausting the Unit is the Cost for this action."

So once you control a battlefield, every unit you play there arrives able to move straight away, or to pay a cost that asks you to exhaust a friendly unit. The deck is stacked with cards that reward exactly that:

• Riven, Broken Blade (4 Energy, 4 Might): "When I become exhausted, choose one that hasn't been chosen this turn". The choices are to buff her, spend the buff to Stun an enemy unit, or spend it to ready her again. Played to your battlefield, she enters ready, moves, and triggers.
• Reckless Innovator (3 Energy, 3 Might): when it becomes exhausted, make a Gold gear token or pay a Chaos power to draw 1. It has [Accelerate] too, so it can enter ready even when you don't hold a battlefield yet.
• RAD-028RAD-028Shop on TCGplayer Ki Burst (1 Energy): exhaust a friendly unit as an extra cost to Stun a unit. In this deck the cost triggers one of the cards above.
• Blade of the Exile (3 Energy): an Equipment that gives +3 Might and Ganking, so the unit holding it can move from battlefield to battlefield. Its Equip cost is a power "or exhaust a friendly unit", another free trigger.
• SFD-048SFD-048Shop on TCGplayer Stellacorn Herder (4 Energy): "When I move, draw 1." Every move the Legend enables is a card.

Image credit: Riot Games via the official Riftbound card gallery (RAD-105, RAD-028, SFD-048).

One rule question comes up a lot. When Broken Blade was revealed, u/Low_FramesTTV asked on r/Riftbound: "The card coming in tapped doesn't count as becoming exhausted correct? Still learning" The reply was "Thats right". In practice: play Riven where she enters ready, then exhaust her. A Riven who enters exhausted in your base has triggered nothing.

One reason for every card

The 2-drops. OGN-199OGN-199Shop on TCGplayer Tideturner swaps places with a friendly unit when played. RAD-107RAD-107Shop on TCGplayer Bedeviling Stranger can bounce an enemy unit from a battlefield with 4 or more units on it. UNL-053UNL-053Shop on TCGplayer Scuttle Crab draws a card and can hold a battlefield with 0 Might. Seven cheap units, so you can take a battlefield early, which is when the Legend starts working.

Reckless Innovator and Stellacorn Herder, three each. The two engines. Innovator gives you mana or a card every time it's exhausted, and Herder draws every time it moves.

Astral Heron, three. VEN-044VEN-044Shop on TCGplayer Astral Heron is the top of the curve: 7 Energy, 7 Might, and while it's at a battlefield, the card after your first card each turn costs 2 Energy and two power less. Three of the nine Riven players cut it, including the 11th-place list.

Blitzcrank, one. A 5-cost Tank that pulls an enemy unit to its battlefield when you play it there.

Zhonya's Hourglass, three. OGN-077OGN-077Shop on TCGplayer Zhonya's Hourglass saves the next friendly unit that would die and recalls it to base. Riven, Broken Blade is the unit you'd want saved.

The Good Stuff, one. RAD-106RAD-106Shop on TCGplayer The Good Stuff is a Deploy gear: discard 1, draw 3, and it comes back to your hand when you hold its battlefield.

Counters and tricks. OGN-045OGN-045Shop on TCGplayer Defy (counter a cheap spell) and OGN-058OGN-058Shop on TCGplayer Discipline (+2 Might, draw 1) were in all nine lists at three copies or close to it. Rebuke and Gust bounce a unit, Star-Crossed bounces one of theirs and one of yours, SFD-145SFD-145Shop on TCGplayer Switcheroo swaps two units' Might, and OGN-173OGN-173Shop on TCGplayer Ride the Wind moves a unit and readies it, so it can be exhausted again for another trigger.

The Battlefields. RAD-163RAD-163Shop on TCGplayer Hunters' Circle makes your first unit or gear there each turn cost 1 less. UNL-215UNL-215Shop on TCGplayer Star Spring lets you move another of your units there back to base the first time you play a unit there each turn, and if that unit is Stellacorn Herder, it draws. Emperor's Dais, when you conquer it, lets you pay 1 Energy to return a unit there to your hand and leave a 2 Might Sand Soldier token in its place. All nine lists ran Star Spring and eight ran Emperor's Dais.

How the other Riven players built it

IHATECOFFEE's list is the other real build. It swaps the big Calm units for Chaos units that pay off moving: Treasure Hunter makes a Gold gear token when it moves, and Traveling Merchant discards and draws. If you're short on Astral Herons, that's the version to try.

All nine lists went 27-19-1 together. riftbound.gg doesn't publish pairings for this event, so we can't break that down by opponent. What we can say is who was in the room: 14 Kennen, 12 Kai'Sa and 12 Yasuo players. Sithis finished ahead of the best Kai'Sa (2nd) and Yasuo (3rd) lists, though Yasuo put six lists in the Top 16 to Riven's four, and its 12 players went 39-27-6, a hair better than Riven's record once draws are left out.

The turns that matter

Each turn you channel 2 runes, and the Core Rules give the player going second one extra rune on their first turn. A rune can be exhausted for 1 Energy or recycled for a power of its Domain. That puts Riven, Broken Blade (4) on turn 2 either way, and Astral Heron (7) on turn 3 going second and turn 4 going first.

We dealt 200,000 opening hands from Sithis's list for each seat with the Core Rules mulligan: set aside up to two cards, draw that many and recycle the rest. Our model keeps any hand with a 2-cost unit and otherwise sets aside the two most expensive cards. Both players draw on their first turn in a 1v1, so the seat didn't change the cards seen, and the two seats came out within 0.3 points of each other.

Three copies of a card in 39 don't show up often. So don't mulligan for Blade. Keep a 2-drop, take the first battlefield, and let Riven herself be the threat on turn 2. She's always available from the Champion Zone.

How to pilot it

1. Take a battlefield first. The Legend does nothing until you control one. A 2-cost unit on turn 1 is the keep.
2. Play units at the battlefield, not at base. That's where they enter ready. At base they enter exhausted and trigger nothing.
3. Count exhaust triggers before you attack. A move, a Ki Burst cost and a Blade equip can each set off Riven or Innovator. Riven's choices can't repeat in a turn, so plan which one you need.
4. Put Blade on the unit that needs to switch battlefields. Ganking lets it move from battlefield to battlefield, which is how you score a second one.
5. Keep Defy up when you're ahead. Three Defy and a Star-Crossed are there so a lead survives one opposing turn.

picopau_'s three-minute guide covers the same plan from a different list:

Posting it to r/Riftbound on October 21, u/picopau_ wrote that "riftbound feels good when your deck is significantly better than every other deck ever". That's a joke, mostly. Showdown 5 is one online event before release, and four Top 16s from nine players is strong, not proof. The next big result backed it up: at the 755-player LDXP Sacramento Showdown on October 24, Nam Dang won with Riven at 11-0-2, and 7 of the 16 Top 16 lists were Riven. All 96 Riven lists there ran Reckless Innovator.

Our take

We'd build Sithis's list close to as-is. The one change we'd consider is Twilight Shroud: only Sithis ran it, and Battle Preparations or a fourth counter-spell is the more common choice in the other lists. If three Blades are too much to spend on a new deck, wait. Nine of nine lists ran three, so there's no proven budget version yet.

Riven also changes what to buy from Radiance. Reckless Innovator, at about $0.24 for the plain card on TCGplayer as of October 31 ($1.52 foil; it was $1.81 on October 23), is in every Riven list and in other decks too. Our Radiance best cards ranking, linked below, puts it first. If you're new to the game, the Riftbound complete guide covers how battlefields and scoring work before you try this.

How we checked this: on October 23, 2026 we pulled the standings, records (W-L-D) and all 9 Riven decklists from Showdown 5 on riftbound.gg and counted card usage with our script (scripts/sims/riftbound-showdown5-radiance.py). The odds table comes from 200,000 simulated hands per seat, one run with a fixed seed (scripts/sims/riftbound-riven-opening-odds.py, seed 20261023). Card text is from Riot's card gallery; deck rules, rune and mulligan rules from Riot's Core Rules. Prices are TCGplayer market prices on October 31, 2026. Last reviewed: October 29, 2026.

Related Reading

• Riftbound Radiance Best Cards From 74 Tournament Decklists: every Radiance card that made the Showdown 5 Top 16.
• Riftbound Radiance Legends: Full List, Domains and Text: Riven and the other eight new Legends.
• Riftbound Irelia Deck Guide: Calm-Chaos Blade Dancer Build: another Calm and Chaos deck that uses Astral Heron and ready effects.
• Riftbound Vex Deck Guide: Gloomist Control Build 2026: the slower Calm and Chaos option.

References

• NovaRiftbound's $2,000 Online Showdown 5 on riftbound.gg: date, standings, records and decklists, checked October 23, 2026.
• Official Riftbound card gallery: card text and images.
• Riftbound Core Rules: deck building, entering exhausted, standard move, runes, mulligan and 1v1 first turn.
• TCGplayer: Blade of the Exile and TCGplayer: Reckless Innovator: market prices, October 31, 2026.