Defect Card Tier List

Ratings come from community-submitted runs: Codex Score grades a card's win rate when picked against the average. This is Defect as of mid-July 2026 on the main branch, and the headline is that Defect has no S-tier card right now, the flattest top end of any character. The live tier list updates continuously.

The top of the list

[[All for One]] leads at A tier with a 52.9% win rate. Zero-cost recursion has been Defect's best plan since the first game and the sequel data agrees. [[Ignition]] (52.3%) rides co-op, it channels Plasma for another player, so solo players should discount it.

[[Reboot]] (50.9%) is quietly excellent as both a reset button and draw engine in one card.

The reputation check

[[Echo Form]] is the most interesting row in the whole dataset: a 64.6% pick rate, the highest of any Defect rare, against a 50.8% win rate that only earns B tier. Players draft it like it is still the STS1 win condition. It is good, but the data says it is a fair card being picked like a broken one. Same story smaller with [[Machine Learning]] (44.7% pick, 49.1% win).

Solid picks

[[Supercritical]], [[Helix Drill]], and [[Meteor Strike]] round out B tier. Meteor Strike at a 14.1% pick rate is the underdrafted one of the three; three Plasma attached to 24 damage is real tempo. [[Ice Lance]] and [[Signal Boost]] sit at C, take them with a plan or not at all.

The traps

[[Darkness]], [[Barrage]], and [[Sunder]] hold the floor at 29 to 31% win rates. Barrage especially reads like orb payoff and performs like a blank.

The relics

Defect's relic pool mirrors its card pool: solid, no standouts. The full grades are on the relic tier list; relic win rates run high everywhere, so read the tiers, not the raw percentages.

[[relic:Power Cell]] leads at A tier and a 63.5% win rate, with [[relic:Data Disk]] right behind it as one of the best commons anywhere, a permanent Focus from floor 1. [[relic:Gold-Plated Cables]] and [[relic:Metronome]] both reward committed orb decks at B tier. The trap is [[relic:Infused Core]] at F tier and a 41.7% win rate, over twenty points under the pool's best.

Full numbers with per-act pick splits and Codex Elo live on the card metrics page. Think the meta is missing something? Upload your runs.

More character tier lists: Ironclad, Silent, Necrobinder, Regent.