Quick answer
A Leader is the card a One Piece deck is built around. It sits outside the 50-card deck, it carries the life total the player defends, it sets the colours the deck is allowed to use, and it is the card the opponent attacks. Bandai’s database lists 142 distinct Leader cards. CardSpicy indexes every one of them with its life, colour, type line and printed effect.
Chasing a Leader is a different kind of buying from chasing a card that goes into a deck, because the Leader is the deck.
In most trading card games the most important card is the one that wins the game. In One Piece the most important card is the one you choose before the game starts, and it is the only card you are guaranteed to see. That makes Leaders the most legible part of the card pool to a collector: there are few of them, they are all named characters, and each one is a permanent statement of what the deck does.
What a Leader decides
- The colours. A deck may only contain cards in its Leader’s colours. A two-colour Leader is the only way to run two palettes at once.
- The life total. The Leader starts the game with a number of face-down Life cards. Each successful attack removes one; when the last is gone, the next attack wins.
- The power ceiling of the attack you must survive. The Leader’s own power decides how hard it is to hit.
- Its own effect. Every Leader has one, and it is usually the most influential single effect in the deck.
The numbers on a Leader
Across the 142 distinct Leaders in the database, the printed life total is almost always 5 (75 cards) or 4 (61 cards); six Leaders sit outside that at 3, 6 or 2. Printed power is even more uniform: 5000 on 136 of the 142, 6000 on five, and 7000 on one.
Those two numbers are the whole of the Leader’s raw statistics, and they pull against each other. A Leader with more life tends to carry less power, and the reverse — which is why a 5-life Leader with 5000 power is the shape most decks are built around.
| Colour | Single-colour Leaders | What the colour does |
|---|---|---|
| Blue | 14 | Draws cards and manipulates the deck and hand. |
| Red | 13 | Attacks and rushes; aggression as a plan. |
| Green | 12 | Rests opposing cards and controls the board. |
| Purple | 12 | Trades DON!! cards for tempo. |
| Black | 12 | Removes opposing characters by cost. |
| Yellow | 11 | Plays with Life cards and triggers. |
The remaining 68 Leaders are dual-colour, and they are the only two-colour cards in the game. Between them they cover every pairing of the six colours that has been printed so far.
Single-colour and dual-colour
Most Leaders are one colour: 74 of the 142. The other 68 are printed in two, and those are the cards that let a deck combine two playstyles. In the database all 68 two-colour cards in the entire game are Leaders — there is no two-colour Character, Event or Stage.
A two-colour Leader is marked on our index with two separate colour dots rather than a blended one, because the card genuinely belongs to both colours and a blended dot would invent a third that does not exist on the card.
Reading a Leader before you buy
Four things, in order. The name, because that is what you are actually collecting. The colour, because it decides whether you can use the card at all. The effect, because it decides how the deck plays. And the code, because a Leader can be reprinted and a treatment of a Leader is still that Leader.
Because a Leader is never shuffled in, it is also the part of a collection that shows wear least. A Leader that has been played in hundreds of games can still be a clean card, which is one of the reasons graded Leaders are a different proposition from graded cards that live in a deck.
Frequently asked questions
How many Leader cards are there in One Piece?
The official database lists 142 distinct Leader cards at the date shown, counted with treatments folded into the card they belong to. There are 320 Leader entries in total before that folding, because Leaders receive alternate artwork like every other rarity.
Does the Leader go into the deck?
No. The deck is 50 cards and the Leader sits outside it in its own zone. The Leader is never shuffled, which is why it is the one card you are certain to see every game.
Can a deck use two colours?
Only if its Leader is printed in two colours. A deck may contain only cards in its Leader’s colours, so a two-colour Leader is the only route to a two-colour deck.
How much life does a Leader start with?
It is printed on the card. Almost every Leader starts with 5 or 4 life; across the 142 Leaders in the database, 75 start at 5, 61 at 4, and six at 3, 6 or 2. The number is fixed for that card and cannot be changed.
Sources
Sources and further reading
- Bandai — the official One Piece Card Game card database, the source of the Leader count, life totals, powers and type lines quoted here.
- CardSpicy — the Leader index: every Leader printed so far, in set and card order, with the full printed effect.
- CardSpicy — the six colours of DON!!, for what each colour does and how colour identity is enforced.
- CardSpicy — the most-drawn characters, for the characters who have received the most cards.
- CardSpicy — what the One Piece Card Game is, for how a game is actually played.
Card statistics on this page are counted from Bandai’s own card database at the date shown, so they move as the database is updated. Prices are not quoted here: this site prices graded cards in US dollars from observed sales, and a raw-card figure would be a different number measured a different way. Where a card is described as part of a set, the set code and release date are the English edition.