PLAY'S · Metagame · 14 Sep 2026

The gap at the top has closed

On 5 September the most-played deck led the field by 7.7 points. On 13 September it led by 2.0. Nothing was banned and nothing was released — one deck simply climbed.

Ranked play, eight days apart

New Division · all ranks · same survey, same method

Deck	5 Sep	13 Sep	Change
Fire/Light Raid	19.8%	17.8%	−2.0
Zenith Heaven's Gate	11.2%	15.8%	+4.6
HADES Dragerion	12.1%	12.8%	+0.7
Water/Dark Magic Tools	6.2%	6.9%	+0.7
Everything else	12.9%	13.0%	+0.1

Zenith Heaven's Gate is the deck that moved. It has gone from third to second, and the top three now sit within five points of each other rather than spread across eight. All three decklists are here.

The Grand Prix does not explain it

The event ran on 13 September and was won by Magic Tools — which sits sixth on the ladder and moved by less than a point. Whatever effect a tournament result has on what people queue up with, it had not happened yet on the day itself.

Zenith Heaven's Gate had already been climbing before the final was played. If the win moves anything, it will show in the days after.

How much to read into this

One day, and a smaller one The 13 September survey covers 304 games against 420 a week earlier — about 28% fewer. A smaller sample moves more on its own, and Grand Prix day is exactly when you would expect fewer people on the ladder.

A 4.6-point move on 304 games is roughly fourteen matches. That is a real change and it is also not a large number of games. Treat the direction as informative and the exact figure as approximate.

The honest version: the deck at the top is less dominant than it was, and the deck that gained is the slowest of the three. Whether that holds needs another few days of data, which arrive daily.

And then it ended

The format this article measured no longer exists. Set 37 went live on 24 September and a set rotated out with it, so the numbers above are now history.

The last reading of the old format · 23 September · 151 games

Deck	5 Sep	13 Sep	23 Sep
Fire/Light Raid	19.8%	17.8%	17.9%
HADES Dragerion	12.1%	12.8%	15.2%

Raid finished where it had been for three weeks — first, and not by much. Dragerion closed the gap instead of Zenith Heaven's Gate, which was the deck climbing a week earlier.

Read that last column lightly 151 games against 420 three weeks earlier. The survey shrank by nearly two thirds, on the day before a release — which is exactly when people stop grinding ranked. A final figure taken from a thinning ladder is a weak one.

What it is good for is a baseline. Whatever the ladder looks like in a week, this is what it was standing on the day the new cards arrived. What those cards do is here.

Sources

All three surveys: BEANS, New Division ranked reports for 5, 13 and 23 September 2026 — 420, 304 and 151 games respectively, all ranks, published daily. Who they are.
Figures are read from the published graphs and reported here as numbers; no images are reproduced. How this game's statistics are made, and what they cannot tell you.
Grand Prix result: see the linked article, where the caveats on it are set out.

Closed 24 September This started as a snapshot of a shifting ladder and has become the record of a format that ended. The next set of numbers will be measuring something else.