PLAY'S · COMMUNITY · 4 OCT 2026

Players are teching against Jokers, and winning with the deck nobody ranks

On 2 and 3 October the people posting about this format in Japanese were mostly working out how to beat Jokers, or reporting a ladder finish with Cotton Zenith — the deck the published ranking still does not list anywhere. Around that: complaints about the Legend Battle that are all about its shape rather than its difficulty, a deck-building campaign that closes today, and a competitive conversation that had moved to All Division before the event driving it was announced. Two of the bugs the publisher listed on 30 September had been described by players days earlier.

This page reports what was said, not what is true Everything below is a record of what players posted, with the date they posted it. None of it is checked against the game, and none of it is a finding of this site. Where somebody states a card interaction, a win rate or a plan by the publisher, that is their claim, and it is written here as their claim.

It is also not a survey. These are posts that surfaced in a handful of Japanese keyword searches on 3 and 4 October. Nobody counted anything, and quiet opinions do not post.

Everyone is building against Jokers

The clearest pattern on 3 October was not people playing Jokers. It was people working out what to do about it.

One player posted, more or less in full, that there are too many Jokers and asked for counters. A Raid player wrote that the matchup is lost once ドンジャングル lands, so they were adding クラッシュ覇道 and added that telling them to kill it first is not advice. Another said a card in 赤黒轟轟轟 had visibly improved their Jokers matchup, because it answers ドンジャングル and breaks ミクセル on the way. A video posted the same morning was about adding ミクセル to a 天門 list specifically to fight 緑ジョーカーズ.

A Jokers player gave the other side of it: they reached Master in both divisions with it, said Magic Tools decks feed it, and said Raid and fast aggro are the hard matchups.

Three names for one deck Players call it 緑ジョーカーズ. The daily survey calls it ジョーカーズ. The ranking calls it 自然ジョーカーズ. They appear to be the same deck, and this site has not confirmed that they are drawn the same way.

The answers people name are meta cards, not new decks

Across the posts the recurring answer to this format is a slot, not an archetype. The cards named in two days were カクラン and ポクチン in a Magic Tools list, ミクセル in 天門, タリスク in 赤白轟轟轟, ゴーゴンシャック in an All Division deck against spell-heavy opponents, and クラッシュ覇道 in Raid.

Nobody in these posts claimed the format needs a new deck. They described adding one or two cards to an existing one. One creator's video framed the week the same way: new themes appeared, and beatdown decks answered by packing spell hate.

The deck no ranking lists keeps turning up in Master posts

Cotton Zenith is not in the published New Division ranking — not in its top tier, not in any tier below it, not on the page at all, as of its 3 October update. The numbers page covers that.

In the same two days, players posted: a New Division Master finish with a white-black Cotton list; another New Division Master run where they switched to Cotton partway up; an All Division Master finish with a different Cotton build, with their own win-loss record attached; and — on 2 October — a post claiming a momentary rank one on the ladder with white-black Cotton. One more player wrote that they find Cotton more tiresome to play against than Raid.

A deck that no published ranking lists is the deck people keep posting ladder finishes with. Both of those things can be true at once.

None of that is evidence the ranking is wrong. A momentary rank-one post is one player on one day, self-reported, and the people who lose with a deck do not usually post about it. It is simply the case that the two pictures do not match, and this site cannot say which is the better guide.

Two of the bugs were described by players before the list named them

The publisher's known-issues notice was updated on 30 September with twenty-four issues, and this site wrote them up. Two of them had already been posted about.

On 27 September a player asked whether 卍夜の降凰祭 had a bug, describing a CPU opponent putting out strange cards and the game then becoming unable to proceed. That is the story-mode soft-lock. On 28 September another player filed what they called a minor report: summoning one creature was somehow producing 龍神ヘヴィ instead, with its on-play effect usable. A 龍神ヘヴィ・メタル entry is second on the publisher's list.

Both posts predate the 30 September update. What that shows is only that players found and described these before that update went up; whether the publisher already knew, and for how long, is not something this site can establish, because the notice is edited in place and no earlier copy is archived.

The fix for all twenty-four went live at about 18:30 on 1 October. These searches turned up no posts about the patch afterwards — which is not the same as nobody having posted any.

One player expects a nerf. That is a guess.

A Baraghiara player wrote on 3 October that what worries them most is the possibility of a nerf, arguing that the digital version of one card is strong enough that nothing else gets played, and that the operator has a habit of making a card stronger than its paper original and later returning it to the paper version. That is one player's reading of past behaviour, not an announcement. No card change has been announced since the four at the 24 September maintenance, which this site covered.

Elsewhere a player wrote that a free-cast effect was not being stopped by an opposing replacement effect the way they expected, and called it a text bug. That is a complaint, not a listed issue; it does not appear on the publisher's notice.

The Legend Battle complaints are about its shape, not its difficulty

The solo event that opened on 1 October drew a separate kind of posting, and almost none of it was about whether the fights are hard. On 2 October one player described the format as the same as previous non-collaboration Legend Battles — grinding the hardest tier eight more times at 500 points a win — while allowing that unlocking the second half from one win at each difficulty was an improvement on what came before. Another wrote that the points on offer could stand to be higher.

On 3 October a player said they had written into the in-game survey asking for the timed unlocks to be removed altogether, so that a player could keep going until their tickets ran out instead of waiting for each chapter. A fourth, on 2 October, said ranked felt less enjoyable to them than the paper game at the moment and that they were spending their time on the Legend Battle and the story instead.

One post on the morning of 3 October simply announced that chapter two had unlocked that day, which matches the schedule the publisher gave. The calendar has the rest of it.

The competitive conversation had already moved to All Division

BATTLE ARENA 2026 AUTUMN was announced on 1 October, and it is an All Division event. Players were writing as though that were settled before the announcement.

On 29 September one post said that since BA is an All Division event, it was time to start surveying that format — two days before the announcement. A streamer the same day was going for All Division Master "for the next BA". On 28 September a returning player who had reached Master in both divisions wrote that the All Division deck they had used to get there was not one that wins at BA, so they would have to find another. On 23 September someone placing third in a community event wrote that they were aiming to win the next BA.

Where that expectation came from is not established here These posts call it "the next BA", so the obvious explanation is that earlier editions were All Division and players were going on precedent. This site has not checked what format previous BATTLE ARENA events used, and nothing in these posts says where the expectation came from.

It is worth saying plainly what that means for the numbers on this site. The encounter data is New Division, and it is the best daily record of that format in public. The players preparing for October's two competitive events stopped talking about that format in September. Both readings can be accurate and describe different rooms.

A deck-building campaign is running, and it closes today

The publisher's own deck-posting campaign runs from 26 September to 4 October, so it closes today. Entries follow a set template — deck name, what it does, and a line on why the builder likes it — and they were still arriving on the afternoon of 3 October.

Two of the ones posted that day are built on this set. One assembles four copies of a piece using ガ・リュミーズ to take an extra turn and win on an alternative condition, with the builder noting it takes about seven turns to do. Another loops Baraghiara back to hand to generate mana without limit, and adds a card to stop the builder's own hand overflowing — a different route from the one this site documented. An entry from 26 September was built around ミノガミ's alternative win condition; the arena event announced five days later is named after that card.

These are entries, not conversation Everything in this section was posted to a hashtag the publisher is running a campaign on, and the prize is a draw — fifteen entrants get a card ticket. People write differently when they are entering something. The rules also require the deck to contain cards from the new set, so the subject matter is set by the campaign as well as the format. These are not players saying what they think of the format; they are players presenting a deck built to a brief.

What this page is not

It is not a count. A keyword search returns what the service decides to show, in the language searched, on the day searched. Most of what is here is Japanese-language posting from 2 and 3 October, with a few older posts where the date is the point. There is no reason to think it is representative, and several reasons to think it is not: people post wins more than losses, and the loudest matchup complaint is rarely the most common one.

It is also not an endorsement of any claim in it. Where a post says a card does something, this page says that the post says it.

Sources

Public posts on X, located by Japanese keyword search and read on 3 and 4 October 2026. Posts run from 23 September to 3 October and are dated in the text where the date matters. Handles are not reproduced here, and no post is quoted at length; the posts are described rather than copied.

The ranking the Cotton Zenith section refers to, and the encounter numbers: the nine-day page, which carries both sources.

The known-issues notice and the 24 September card changes: the bug page and the card-change page.

Card and deck names are given in Japanese where this site has not confirmed an English name. Effects are described as the posts describe them, in plain English.