Quick answer
The One Piece Card Game runs on six colours — Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Black and Yellow — and a deck may contain only cards in the colours its Leader is printed in. The card pool is close to even across all six, running from 432 to 474 distinct cards each. CardSpicy marks every card on its One Piece index with its colour, and a dual-colour Leader gets two separate dots rather than a blend.
Colour is not decoration. It is the hardest rule in the game and the first thing to check before you buy a card to play with.
Colour does two jobs in One Piece, and it is worth separating them. On the board it is a playstyle: each colour has a family of effects it does well and a family it does badly. In deck construction it is a legality rule: the colour on the card has to appear on the Leader or the card is not allowed in the deck at all.
What each colour does
| Colour | Cards | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Red | 474 | Attacks and rushes. Red wants to hit first and hard, and it pays for that with few defensive tools. |
| Blue | 462 | Draws and manipulates. Blue trades board presence for the right card at the right time. |
| Purple | 459 | Trades DON!! for tempo. Purple bends the resource rules to play ahead of schedule. |
| Green | 450 | Rests and controls. Green decides which of the opponent’s cards get to act. |
| Black | 440 | Removes by cost. Black answers characters on the board rather than racing them. |
| Yellow | 432 | Plays with Life. Yellow works from the Life cards and the trigger effects around them. |
The spread is deliberately flat. Over a pool of nearly 2,800 cards, no colour has been allowed to fall more than about forty cards behind another, which is what keeps six colours viable rather than four.
DON!! cards and what they are
DON!! is the resource in the game. Every player brings a DON!! deck of ten cards, separate from the 50-card main deck and the Leader. On your turn you add DON!! cards to your field, and you attach them to characters or spend them to pay costs. An attached DON!! card usually adds 1000 power to the character it sits on, which is the arithmetic behind most combat decisions.
The six colours all run on the same DON!! deck. Colour does not change how much resource you have; it changes what you can spend it on.
Dual-colour Leaders
A handful of Leaders are printed in two colours, and that is the only way to build a two-colour deck. In the database there are 68 such Leaders, and they are the only two-colour cards in the entire game — there is no two-colour Character, Event or Stage at all.
On our index a dual-colour Leader carries two separate colour dots rather than one blended dot. The reason is simple: a blended dot would show a colour that does not appear on the card. A Red/Green Leader is red and it is green, and it is not orange.
Where colour shows up when you buy
Three places, and they are the same three every time. On a Leader, as the rule that decides your deck.
On a character, as the reason its effects refer to types rather than colours: an effect that says “up to 1 of your {Straw Hat Crew} type Characters” is written against a type line, not a colour, so a colour rule never accidentally excludes an effect.
And in deck lists, where a card being the wrong colour is the most expensive mistake a new player makes — not because the card is bad, but because it cannot legally be played.
Frequently asked questions
How many colours are in the One Piece Card Game?
Six: Red, Green, Blue, Purple, Black and Yellow. A deck may only contain cards in the colours its Leader is printed in, so a single-colour Leader gives a single-colour deck.
How many DON!! cards do you start with?
The DON!! deck is ten cards, separate from the 50-card main deck and the Leader. You add DON!! cards to your field over the course of the game and attach them to characters or spend them to pay costs.
Can a deck be two colours?
Only if its Leader is printed in two colours. There are 68 dual-colour Leaders in the database, and they are the only two-colour cards in the game.
Can I put a card of the wrong colour in my deck?
No. A deck may contain only cards in its Leader’s colours. It is a legality rule rather than a guideline, and it is the reason a card’s colour is worth checking before you buy it to play with.
Sources
Sources and further reading
- Bandai — the official One Piece Card Game card database. The per-colour counts above are the distinct cards in the database at the date shown.
- CardSpicy — the Leader index, where every Leader is shown with its colour and life.
- CardSpicy — One Piece Leaders explained, for what a Leader decides and how dual-colour Leaders work.
- CardSpicy — what the One Piece Card Game is, for the rules in context.
- CardSpicy — the most-drawn characters, for which characters carry which colours.
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.