There are five Legendary Jokers and exactly one way to get any of them: The Soul, a Spectral card with a 3 in 1000 chance to replace any single card in a Spectral Pack or Arcana Pack. Open a Mega Arcana Pack and you see 5 cards, so you are looking at roughly 1.5% per pack. Most runs never see one.
Which means the useful question is not "which Legendary is strongest." It is which ante you found it in. A Perkeo on Ante 2 wins the run. A Perkeo on Ante 7 is a $10 sell.
The five at a glance
| Joker | Effect | What it is | Needs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Triboulet | Played Kings and Queens each give X2 Mult | Score core | A K/Q-dense deck |
| Canio | Gains X1 Mult per face card destroyed | Scaling core | A destruction engine |
| Perkeo | Negative copy of 1 random consumable on leaving the shop | Resource engine | Time, and a scorer elsewhere |
| Yorick | Gains X1 Mult per 23 cards discarded | Slow scaling core | Discard economy |
| Chicot | Disables every Boss Blind effect | Insurance | Nothing, it just works |
All five: $20 buy price (never actually paid), $10 sell, cannot appear in the shop.
Ranked, with the reasoning
1. Triboulet. Five scoring Kings and Queens is X32 before anything else fires. Add Sock and Buskin and each face retriggers, so that same hand reaches X1024. Nothing else in the game gets there off a single Joker slot. The cost is real though: you have to spend Tarots reshaping the deck toward Kings and Queens, and a High Card build barely touches it.
2. Perkeo. It does not score a single chip, and it is still this high. A Negative copy of a consumable every shop means the copy costs no slot, so the engine never clogs. Give it 6 antes and it builds whatever you point it at: stacked Planets under an Observatory, Cryptid spam for a one-card deck, Deja Vu seals on your scorers. Found late it does nothing in time.
3. Canio. The best multiplicative scaler in the game on paper. One Hanged Man is instantly X2. The catch is that face cards are usually where your deck's damage lives, so every point of Canio scaling is a point of hand quality spent. Overfeed it in Ante 3 and you lose Ante 3.
4. Chicot. It turns every Boss Blind into a plain blind with a bigger number, which quietly removes the single most common cause of run death: a build with one hole, meeting the boss that targets that hole. It costs a Joker slot and returns zero score, so it is a luxury for builds that already win — not a fix for builds that do not.
5. Yorick. X1 per 23 discarded cards. With a normal 3 discards and a 5-card hand size you are looking at 15 cards a round, so roughly X1 every other round. That is not slow in a vacuum, it is slow relative to the other four. Merry Andy and a big hand size fix it; nothing else does.
The find-time table
This is the part that actually decides the run.
| Found on | Triboulet | Canio | Perkeo | Yorick | Chicot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ante 1-3 | Build around it | Build around it | Build around it | Build around it | Keep |
| Ante 4-6 | Keep if deck has faces | Keep if you have destruction | Keep, still 4+ shops | Only with Merry Andy | Keep |
| Ante 7+ | Keep, it is instant value | Marginal, no time to scale | Sell | Sell | Keep, boss insurance |
Triboulet and Chicot are the two that pay off immediately. The other three are investments, and investments found on Ante 7 are just $10.
What breaks each of them
| Joker | Hard counter |
|---|---|
| Triboulet | The Plant. Debuffed Kings and Queens do not trigger it at all. |
| Canio | The Plant again. Face cards destroyed while debuffed give no scaling. |
| Yorick | The Water removes all discards, so it cannot scale that blind. |
| Perkeo | Nothing mechanical. Its enemy is running out of antes. |
| Chicot | Nothing. That is the point. |
Two of the five fold to a single Boss Blind, and the Joker that answers Boss Blinds is on the same list. Chicot plus Triboulet is not a cute synergy, it is the fix for Triboulet's only real weakness.
Stacking Legendaries
Slots are the constraint. Running three Legendaries means three of your five slots produce a build with one scorer, and that loses to raw blind scaling. A workable Legendary pairing looks like:
- Triboulet + Chicot — scorer plus its own counter-counter.
- Canio + Perkeo — Perkeo duplicates The Hanged Man and Justice, which are exactly Canio's fuel.
- Triboulet + Perkeo — Perkeo duplicates The Empress and Strength to build the K/Q density Triboulet wants.
Two Legendaries plus three support Jokers is the shape that wins. Four Legendaries is a screenshot.
Run the numbers on a K/Q hand with Triboulet and Sock and Buskin in the score calculator.
Individual guides
- Canio — the destruction scaler
- Triboulet — the King and Queen multiplier
- Yorick — the discard scaler
- Chicot — the Boss Blind off switch
- Perkeo — the Negative consumable printer
FAQ
No. Wraith creates a random Rare Joker, Judgement creates a random Joker from the standard pool. The Soul is the only route to a Legendary.
Not from a normal Soul drop, since stickers are applied to shop Jokers. This matters for Madness, which only eats non-Eternal Jokers, so it will happily destroy your Legendary.
Only if the shop offers nothing else. At 0.3% per card, deliberately hunting The Soul costs more in rerolls and skipped Jokers than it returns. Buy the packs you would have bought anyway and treat The Soul as a bonus.