PLAY'S · Metagame · 8 Sep 2026

The three decks holding the format together

From 420 ranked games recorded on 5 September, three decks account for 43% of everything played. Below are their full lists, translated.

Build costs are included, because the gap between them is larger than the gap in play rate.

What is being played

New Division · all ranks · 420 games · 5 September 2026

This is not the same picture the tournament data gave. At the end of July, Dragerion took a fifth of a sanctioned field and Raid was fourth at 7.6%. That breakdown is here. Six weeks later they have swapped: Raid is on top and Dragerion has halved.

Worth remembering that these measure different things — one is a bracketed event, the other is the open ladder. Why that matters.

1 · Fire/Light Raid

Thirteen cards cost two. Nothing in the deck costs four or six. It is built to put creatures down immediately, hold the opponent off with disruption — Mixel and Tasuriku punish cheating things into play, Oriotis Judge punishes ramping — and then convert to a kill with two seven-cost finishers.

Raid burns shields rather than breaking them, which means the defender gets no cards and no Shield Triggers. That is the whole problem this format revolves around, and this deck sidesteps it.

2 · HADES Dragerion

Zero spells. Every card is a creature, and most of them are dragons with a cost reduction tied to how full your graveyard is. The deck fills its own graveyard early, then puts down something enormous far ahead of schedule.

The cost-13 finisher wipes every creature at 9000 power or less on arrival, and keeps doing it to the next three that appear. Two copies is enough because the deck is built to find it.

3 · Zenith Heaven's Gate

Heaven's Gate cheats Light blockers into play for free. The deck stalls behind them, then lands Lionel Krone — the card the community spent August arguing about — which generates three random Zeniths onto its own shields and gives them Shield Trigger.

Twelve cards cost nine or more. Against Raid, which wants the game over well before then, this is the matchup the format is currently organised around.

What the costs tell you

The most-played deck is also the most expensive one. That is not the usual shape — aggressive decks are normally the budget option — and it is worth knowing before you assume the top of the ladder is where cheap decks go to lose.

For scale, the collaboration deck builders currently on sale contain 36 cards for a fixed price and are aimed at newcomers. None of them is one of these. What is in them.

A note on the lists

Also worth saying: the usage numbers and the decklists come from two different sources, compiled by different people using different methods, three days apart. They agree on which decks matter, which is reassuring, but they are not one dataset.

Sources

• Usage percentages: BEANS, New Division environment survey for 5 September 2026 — 420 games, all ranks. Published daily. Who they are.
• Decklists, tier placements, deck types and build costs: Kamigame deck guides for Fire/Light Raid, Fire/Water/Darkness Dragerion and 5c Lionel Heaven's Gate, in the current Idol format. Pages updated between 14 August and 4 September 2026.
• English card names are the community patch's. The patch translates names rather than romanising them — Holy, Flash Guardian; Mayu, Serene Revelation — following the convention the paper English release used. Since it is the only English naming this game has, that is what readers see on screen and what this site uses. Card effects are not taken from it; those are described here in plain English from the Japanese. No card text is reproduced; effects are described where they matter to how the deck functions.

Terms are defined in the glossary. Deck names decode as civilizations plus a key card — the breakdown is here.