Idolm@ster Cinderella Girls – Palette (R) [01/24/2026]

I know I’ve stated earlier that I’m not a fan of budget decks or trial deck upgrades. This deck is not necessarily budget nor is there supposed to be a focus on cost totals. However, there is a relation to trial deck upgrades. Now I don’t really see this as a replacement for the trial deck, but I see this as a building onto the trial deck as a base. As I’ve said before on my own post here: Thoughts on Budget Builds/Trial Deck Upgrades, I’m not an advocate for calling it an upgrade for say. We are not looking to make a trial deck+, we are looking to make a deck centred around the trial deck itself.

The red trial deck for Cinderella Girls Next Twinkle is focused primarily, at least in its endgame, on the small sub-unit of Pink Check School. Each of the members respectively carried on one motif of each word in the naming of the sub-unit. We have P, which stands for Pure, covered by Miho Kohinata. We have C, which stands for Charming, covered by Kyoko Igurashi. And lastly, for S, which is Smile, we have Uzuki Shimamura. The group is composed of these three cuties who look to share sweets and adorableness. You can learn more on the Wiki here.

The three members of the sub-unit are clearly shown here in the endgame as mentioned before. Kyoko and Miho work collectively to try and close out the game. Together, they share the same climax combo in which Kyoko will pay a cost to deal three damage on attack whereas Miho will perform a free ping one when she swings. Since they share the same climax, you can use any combination of the two to modulate your end turn. Miho is especially important because her on-play ability allows you to spawn any character from hand and cheat their initial stock costs, meaning you can play a single Miho to spawn Kyoko for free. Uzuki, while not directly related to the combo, is also essential for the deck. Uzuki grabs a door climax when she enters play, guaranteeing setup for the full combo. The sub-unit’s climax, Palette, one of their two unit songs, is shown below.

Maintaining the original trial deck advantage combo, we have Hiromi whom provides a free character salvage on attack with her combo, assuming that all your characters on board are red. Since this deck is pure red anyways, her condition is essentially free.

As a pay-off for our specific build here, we have access to cards like Mirai which grant climax trigger filter for door triggers to all our characters when she swings. Mirai’s ability is a bit special because, unlike other more common climax filter abilities, Mirai’s filtering doesn’t actually fix your hand. Instead, she deals additional damage during the trigger step. This means that, in the late game, should your opponent survive Pink Check School’s assault, you can probably use Mirai as a potential finisher should you be lucky and have several climaxes at the top of your deck. Keep in mind that Mirai gives her ability to all your characters on swing. Frederica here is a large body that has stock charge on reverse with a climax in play. Her power condition is to have all red characters, which is essentially not a condition in our deck. Uzuki is a vanilla red character clean cut profile, meaning that she can only perform her clean cut ability for red characters. If you want to stick to the theme of only red, you can also substitute her with Miku, but I chose Uzuki because she’s cute (also Miku can whiff her power check).

In this build, we also have Miyo, a very cool card that essentially tucks one of our characters underneath herself at the cost of discarding a card at the beginning of our opponent’s attack phase. We can use this in many ways to save our cards and especially in the late game to save our Kyoko or Miho if we think we can combo again the following turn. She’ll release our friend at the beginning of our next draw step. In addition, Miku makes a return as a climax discard profile that also generates us extra stock if our opponent cancels her attack. She was reprinted as Chieri which is fundamentally the same card.

The other pair of spicy tech cards we’re running consist of both Momoka and Kotoka. Momoka and Kotoka are both ways to generate additional stock, especially in the early game. When our opponent plays a climax, both of them can just fly away to our stock pile. Momoka is a level zero reverser whereas Kotoka is a Kazuma profile. We can also use our clean cut Uzuki to attack with them and then quickly shuffle them into our backrow for protection.

The extra spice comes from the backups for the deck. Since we are running pure red, we immediately have the payoff available with the star event backup. This is essentially a reprint of compass from Kantai with an added power boost ability. Think of it like a money counter that’s much cheaper but relies on RNG as balance for its cost instead. Mayu is an old anti-change backup that also sacrifices a character on your stage. Miku is an interesting and rare starfish backup that can revive your other characters when they enter the waiting room.

For support, we just want to maintain the theme and fill the deck with more red cards. Momoka is a search Riki profile that also grants power to your other characters when its reversed. An alternative is Hotaru which is a waiting room Riki instead when sent to waiting room. Kanako is a unique sinker profile which sinks her target to the top of your opponent’s deck instead of the waiting room. Chitose is a Rize profile on play but only for red characters. Sachiko is a drop search profile that also has built in top deck rearrange. Shiki is a salvage brainstormer that has on-play surveil. Sae can accomplish the same thing, but she grants center slot power instead of the surveil. Lastly, Kyoko is a memory Adachi profile that also refunds her stock costs by sending one of your other characters on stage to stock on play.

As far as the gameplay for this deck goes, I think it’s quite solid. I hesitate to call it a trial deck+, since I want to keep the idea that this is a deck that simply marries cards from the trial deck with that of the booster, as expected of how the product is meant to work. The star of the show remains as the trial deck with booster support on the side. In my experience and why I personally bring this deck around is because it works as a good linking point between the trial deck experience and that of formulating your own creative deck. Also, Uzuki is really cute.