Batomon Showdown Trainer Tier List — Pantra & Jinto (Patch 1.5.1)

Which trainer should you pick in patch 1.3.0?

The community’s September board for Batomon Showdown ranks Painter the best trainer in the game — “I genuinely believe she is the best trainer in the game, bar none” — with Twins and Lucky Girl beside it in S and Gamer alone at the bottom. The thread’s own comment section immediately splits those ratings by region, and that is the honest headline: the best pick depends on whether you are building in Pantra or Jinto. Patch 1.2.0 then added a fourteenth documented trainer — the Smuggler — and buffed three names the board had already graded; patch 1.3.0 (October 6) changed no trainer ratings at all, so the September grades below still stand. Patch 1.5.0 (November 6) then broke the no-trainer streak: the notes run an explicit balance pass for underperforming, low-pick-rate trainers and buff six names — the September grades below predate all of them. Painter, the board’s #1, gets her own section below.

Screenshot: official free demo build on itch.io (berrymint), captured September 27, 2026.

How trainers work — and why the opener feels random

Every run opens on the screen above: three trainer cards, one prompt — “Select a trainer to begin your journey.” — and one choice that sticks for the whole run. The pick you make matters more than almost any single monster: the trainer’s ability sits on the left panel of your shop screen all run, right above your HP, applying every single day.

Screenshot: official free demo build on itch.io (berrymint), captured September 27, 2026.

The offer itself is random, and that is the community’s standing complaint. A Steam discussion from September 25, titled “Please let us reroll the starting trainers”, puts it plainly: “sometimes the selection is so ass that my soul leaves my body.” The replies mostly push back — the preferred fix, several argue, is buffing and nerfing weak trainers rather than adding a reroll, so people don’t “gravitate to the meta picks.” No reroll exists as of patch 1.2.0; the 1.1.0 patch did touch this screen, adding Batopedia, Settings and Quit buttons to the trainer select, which tells you the developer is iterating on exactly this moment of the run.

One more reason the opener stings: the three cards you see are a sample of a much larger roster, and — as the next section shows — the same trainer can be a star in one region and a dud in the other.

The living board: 22 trainers as rated in September

The original poster graded every trainer they had played, alphabetically; the table below re-sorts their grades strongest-to-weakest and adds what the comment section did to each grade. “Board” is the OP’s rating; the right column is the pushback and context that came after.

Two caveats before the region splits. First, the OP’s own words: grades come from personal experience and statistics, not a tested rubric. Second, the thread’s most-upvoted meta comment isn’t a rating at all — “Which region is this tier list for? Different trainers kick butt in different regions (Bug Catcher is a prime example)” — followed by: “I think this is very heavily focused on jinto region. You can’t just make a tier list of both regions at the same type, the tiers change a lot depending on which one.” The two tables below are that comment, expanded into rows.

The official 1.5.0 trainer balance pass (November 6, 2026)

The September board above grades by personal experience; the patch notes grade by pick rate. Patch 1.5.0 runs an explicit “balance pass for underperforming and low pick rate trainers” — six names get official buffs, and the board has not re-rated since:

The Witch is on the official pass but not on the September board above — the board’s 22 names predate her documentation on this page. None of the six changes has a community re-rating yet; treat the D-tier Gamer row in particular as pre-buff.

One hotfix line lands on this board mid-cadence — Patch 1.5.1 (November 11): Burglar no longer steals Plain Lure, Sweet Lure or Link Cable, tightening the gift engine the 1.5.0 pass had just expanded. (Patch 1.5.1 notes)

Pantra-leaning picks from the same thread

Pantra is the game’s starter region — the one the demo shipped with, before 1.0 added Jinto’s 50+ monsters. When commenters named Pantra specifically, these are the splits they called:

Jinto-leaning picks from the same thread

Jinto is the region added in the 1.0 release, and the same thread reads several trainers differently there:

The Bug Catcher split is the cleanest example of why the boards diverge — and the most-watched trainer video in the game’s launch window happens to be a Jinto Bug Catcher run:

Retromation — Bug Catcher is So Much More Fun in Jinto — YouTube

Retromation — Bug Catcher is So Much More Fun in Jinto

Patch 1.2.0 (September 30): Smuggler arrives, three board names get buffed

The newest patch moved four trainers the September board had already graded, plus one nobody has:

The Smuggler is the structural one: in a game whose tiers split by region, a trainer that pulls the other region’s Batomon into your shop is aimed at exactly the wall the region tables above describe. Until the board refreshes — or a named community grade lands — it stays officially described and unrated, and this page keeps it that way.

Who is Painter? The board’s number one trainer, on the record

Painter is the name this page’s search traffic keeps asking for, so here is everything on the record, each line with its label.

Officially documented: Painter exists and shipped among the six 1.0.0 trainers — “Added 6 new trainers: Twins, Gentleman, Painter, Burglar, Scavenger and Black Belt” (September 15, 2026). The notes publish no ability text for any of the six. Their only other Painter mention groups her with Chef and the type-granting events as sources of Batomon “additional types” — the closest thing to an official ability description that exists. A card-text capture against the live game is still pending.

Community-rated: the September board puts Painter at the very top of S — “I genuinely believe she is the best trainer in the game, bar none” — and no comment in the thread disputes it. The endorsement is about type-stacking, not numbers: “Painter boosting whatever the hell you get your hands on 6 ways from sunday.”

How players run her: every labeled pairing below points the same direction — giving multicast to supports (“being able to give multicast to supports”), the flying-Gemwing multicast chain, and the unverified Opalion + Cairnage + Talonite one-shot line that names Painter as its trainer. None of it is tested in-game. Painter’s value is what the extra types unlock, not any single stat.

Neither patch 1.2.0 nor 1.3.0 touched Painter — no nerf, no buff, no ability text added. If the board’s #1 pick is ever adjusted, this section updates the same day.

Patch 1.3.0 (October 6): no trainer changes — a leaderboard and a Smuggler fix

The third balance patch (1.3.0 notes) contains no trainer balance section at all: nobody was buffed, nerfed, or added. Two entries still touch this page’s territory:

• A Master-rank leaderboard is the patch’s headline feature — the top 10 plus the players near your rank, openable from the title screen. Rank now has an official in-game surface, which makes the community’s region-split ratings above easier to argue about with receipts.
• The Smuggler got a bugfix: it “sometimes” brought “the wrong mix of tiers, like 3 commons” — fixed. The unrated trainer’s core promise (other regions’ Batomon in your shop) now works as described; it still awaits its first community grade.

The September board’s grades therefore stand unrefreshed: Painter still tops it, Twins and Lucky Girl beside her, and the patch cadence this page tracks continues.

Trainer-and-comp pairings the thread hints at

No pairing below has been tested in-game — these are single-comment claims, kept short and labeled. Where they point at a whole comp, the monster-side pages carry the load: the Batomon tier list ranks the monsters themselves, and the best teams overview tracks which engines the patch favored.

• Painter × type-stacking engines. The official 1.0.0 notes confirm Painter grants Batomon “additional types” (grouped with Chef and events), and the OP’s endorsement is about exactly that: “Painter boosting whatever the hell you get your hands on 6 ways from sunday.” The type-granting reads as the engine behind the game’s biggest Multicast lines too: a dedicated “painted” thread loves “being able to give multicast to supports”, and a multicast thread spells the chain out — “Painter or ‘all mons in your shop have flying’ trinket -> flying gemwing -> gemwing + aviarab to give the gemwing multicast -> multicast gemwing stacks up crazy aviarab multicast”. A separate 16-comment build thread pairs Painter with the Opalion + Cairnage + Talonite one-shot line — tracked, unverified, on the best teams overview.
• Chef × single-type synergy. “the stupid amount of synergy he can trigger by making your single types also Fire types” — burn-adjacent lines get a second type for free.
• Twins × sell-economy. The OP’s dream line: “You know what’s better than one level 3 Swoonet? A level 4 Swoonet, direct.” The warning that comes with it: “make sure you sell the ORIGINAL Batomon, NOT the copy, because the copy sells for 0$ in the shop” — a caveat the 1.2.0 QoL notes made official card text (“Twins now says its copy starts with a sell value of 0”). The Twins page collects the trainer’s whole record.
• Monster Ranger × the Jinto shop-bought trap. “due to the monsters not being bought from the shop, if you’re playing in Jinto it can mess up certain Batomons completely (like Aviarab…)” — free monsters may miss bonuses that shop-bought ones get, per one player.
• Gamer × the Mythical lottery. “You literally don’t have a trainer for 8 days, 30 bucks on day 9 is not a significant sum” — against “If you can just stay alive until you get a mythic you can usually convert it into a win.” The Mythical side of that bet collects on the monster list as its ??? tab gets documented.

For a general sense of what a top-tier trainer feels like in practice, Haelian’s trainer showcase is the most-watched general pick after Retromation’s Bug Catcher run:

Haelian — My new favorite trainer is a GOD. — YouTube

Haelian — My new favorite trainer is a GOD.

Every trainer name and ability, on the record

Two tables: what official sources actually document, and what the community board adds beyond it.

Officially documented

Community-reported, not yet officially documented

The video itself, kept here as the “Artist” source of record — the trainer card on screen is the one piece of evidence that can settle the name:

Retromation — Artist Has to be the Most Busted Character — YouTube

Retromation — Artist Has to be the Most Busted Character

One more roster mystery with actual demand behind it: a heavily-played Steam review describes a hidden trainer that unlocks deep into long runs — around day 40 by their account — and failed to unlock for them at all. That is one player’s report with no second source; the unlock conditions are unverified, and the community has asked.

The board refreshes with the community, not the calendar — but every second-week balance patch is a natural re-checkpoint, same cadence the monster board follows.