A Leader card is the card a One Piece deck is built around, and there are 142 of them. Each one prints three things that can be compared across the pool: a life total, a power value and a colour identity. This page measures all 142 against each other. The result is less varied than the pool size suggests — two of the three numbers are effectively fixed, and the third does almost all of the work.
Quick answer
The Leader pool varies in one dimension, not three. Power is a constant: 136 of the 142 Leaders print 5,000, so power tells you nothing about which Leader is better. Life takes five different values between 2 and 6, but 75 Leaders print 5 and another 61 print 4, which is 96% of the pool in two adjacent values. The real variable is colour, and it is tied to life: of the 74 single-colour Leaders, 69 print 5 life, and of the 68 dual-colour Leaders, 59 print 4.
Nothing on this page is estimated and no price is printed. Every figure comes from the official card database listed under Sources.
What this page counts
Bandai’s English card database lists 142 distinct Leader card numbers at the date shown under Sources. That is the same 142 our One Piece card index counts, and it is the population this page measures. Alternate art and parallel printings share a card number with the card they reprint, so each Leader is counted once.
Two things this page is not. It is not an explanation of what a Leader does — that is on what a Leader decides. And it is not a list of colour pairs, which is on multicoloured Leaders, where the 74-and-68 split is already documented. What neither page does is cross colour against life, which is the measurement below.
Power is the number that does not vary
| Leader power | Leaders | Share of 142 |
|---|---|---|
| 5,000 | 136 | 95.8% |
| 6,000 | 5 | 3.5% |
| 7,000 | 1 | 0.7% |
Three values, and one of them covers almost the whole pool. A Leader’s power matters during the game because a Leader can attack and be attacked, but as a way of comparing two Leaders before you choose one it is close to useless: 96 times out of 100 you are comparing 5,000 with 5,000.
That is a different situation from Character cards, where power runs from 1,000 to 13,000 across the pool. If you have read what each cost buys, the contrast is the point: Character power is the most variable number on the card, and Leader power is the least.
The seven Leaders that break the constant are all in the upper range and all follow the same trade. The five at 6,000 are OP02-001 Edward.Newgate, OP11-040 Monkey.D.Luffy, OP13-002 Portgas.D.Ace, ST10-002 Monkey.D.Luffy and ST30-001 Luffy & Ace. Four of those five print 3 or 4 life rather than 5. The single 7,000 Leader is OP13-003 Gol.D.Roger, a Red/Purple card, and it keeps 5 life — the only Leader in the game that is above 6,000 and above 4 life at once.
Life is where the variation sits
| Life printed | Leaders | Share of 142 |
|---|---|---|
| 6 | 2 | 1.4% |
| 5 | 75 | 52.8% |
| 4 | 61 | 43.0% |
| 3 | 3 | 2.1% |
| 2 | 1 | 0.7% |
Life is the number of cards a Leader starts with face down in its life area, and losing them is how a game ends, so it is the most consequential number a Leader prints. It is also the number that was designed to vary: five distinct values across 142 cards, from 2 up to 6.
The distribution is not smooth. Two adjacent values, 5 and 4, hold 136 of the 142 Leaders. Everything else is a deliberate exception: two Leaders at 6, three at 3, one at 2. A pool with five possible values where 96% land on two of them is not a dial, it is a switch with a handful of special cases bolted on.
Which makes the exceptions easy to list in full. OP02-001 Edward.Newgate and ST29-001 Monkey.D.Luffy are the two six-life Leaders. OP11-040 Monkey.D.Luffy, OP13-002 Portgas.D.Ace and ST10-002 Monkey.D.Luffy are the three three-life Leaders, and all three print 6,000 power. OP07-097 Vegapunk is the only two-life Leader in the game, a Yellow card at 5,000 power.
The trade: a second colour costs a life
Cross the two numbers and the design logic appears.
| Life | Single-colour Leaders | Dual-colour Leaders | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 5 | 69 | 6 | 75 |
| 4 | 2 | 59 | 61 |
| 3 | 0 | 3 | 3 |
| 2 | 1 | 0 | 1 |
Read down the middle column: 69 of the 74 single-colour Leaders print 5 life, which is 93%. Read down the right column: 59 of the 68 dual-colour Leaders print 4 life, which is 87%. The two-colour card pool is bought with one life, almost every time. No dual-colour Leader has ever printed 6 life, and only six of them have kept 5.
This is the single most useful thing to know when you compare a mono-colour Leader with a two-colour one. The two-colour card gives you access to a second colour’s cards, and the price is written on the card: one fewer life card at the start of every game, which is one fewer chance to draw into a counter and one fewer hit before the game ends. The three dual-colour Leaders at 3 life — OP11-040, OP13-002 and ST10-002 — pay twice, and all three take 6,000 power as the compensation.
The exceptions run the other way too, and they are rarer: six dual-colour Leaders hold 5 life. Any of those six is doing something a normal two-colour Leader cannot, which is why they are worth looking up individually rather than assuming the pattern.
Colour is spread evenly across the pool
Counting every colour a Leader prints, and counting a dual-colour Leader once for each of its two colours, the 142 Leaders produce 210 colour slots — 74 from the single-colour cards and 136 from the dual-colour ones.
| Colour | Single-colour Leaders | All colour slots |
|---|---|---|
| Blue | 14 | 38 |
| Red | 13 | 40 |
| Purple | 12 | 34 |
| Green | 12 | 34 |
| Black | 12 | 32 |
| Yellow | 11 | 32 |
Red leads on both counts and Yellow trails on both, but the spread is narrow: 40 against 32 across 210 slots is a difference of four Leaders’ worth of cards. There is no colour here that has been starved of Leaders, which matters if you are choosing a colour to build around — the choice is about what the colour does, not about whether a Leader exists for it.
What this means when you choose a Leader
- Do not compare Leaders on power. 96% of them print 5,000, and the seven that do not are trading life for it.
- Compare Leaders on life, then on colour. Life is the only number with a real spread, and colour is what decides which of the 50 cards in your deck are legal.
- Read a two-colour Leader as a four-life card until proven otherwise. 59 of 68 are exactly that.
- Treat a dual-colour Leader at 5 life, or any Leader above 4 life with two colours, as a deliberate exception and read its card text before assuming what it does.
For the individual cards, the character pages carry them one by one: every Monkey.D.Luffy card holds 17 Leaders, the largest Leader count of any character, and every Nami card and every Sanji card hold three each. Where those Leaders first appeared is on the starter deck list, since a large share of the pool debuted in an ST product rather than a booster.
Related reading
- Leaders explained — what the card does and what each printed element controls.
- Multicoloured Leaders — all fifteen colour pairs and what the second colour buys.
- Card power and counter — the same measurement applied to the 2,185 Character cards.
- What the One Piece Card Game is — the card types these Leaders sit above.
Frequently asked questions
How many One Piece Leader cards have 6,000 power or more?
Six. Five print 6,000 and one prints 7,000. The 7,000 Leader is OP13-003 Gol.D.Roger, a Red/Purple card at 5 life. The other 136 Leaders print 5,000, which is 96% of the pool, so power is not a useful way to compare two Leaders before you choose one.
Is a two-colour Leader worse than a single-colour Leader?
It starts one life lower in almost every case. 69 of the 74 single-colour Leaders print 5 life, while 59 of the 68 dual-colour Leaders print 4. You are trading a life card for access to a second colour. Six dual-colour Leaders keep 5 life, and three drop to 3 life while taking 6,000 power.
What is the lowest life a One Piece Leader can start with?
Two, and only one card does it: OP07-097 Vegapunk, a Yellow Leader at 5,000 power. Below 3 life there is nothing else in the pool. Only three Leaders print 3 life, and all three are dual-colour cards at 6,000 power.
How many Leaders can start with 6 life?
Two, and both are single-colour: OP02-001 Edward.Newgate, a Red Leader at 6,000 power, and ST29-001 Monkey.D.Luffy, a Yellow Leader at 5,000 power. No dual-colour Leader has ever printed 6 life.
Which colour has the most Leader cards?
Red, on both measures. It has 13 single-colour Leaders, more than any other colour, and 40 colour slots once dual-colour cards are counted twice. Yellow has the fewest at 11 and 32. The spread is narrow enough that no colour is short of Leaders.
Sources
Sources and method
- Leader card data read from the official ONE PIECE CARD GAME English card database, en.onepiece-cardgame.com/cardlist, retrieved 2026-10-20, across all 60 series. 142 distinct Leader card numbers were found, with alternate art and parallel printings folded into the number they reprint.
- Life, power and colour values are the printed values on each card as recorded by that database, not inferred from card text.
- The rule that a Leader’s colour limits the cards a deck may contain, and that Life starts as the number of cards printed on the Leader, from the ONE PIECE CARD GAME Comprehensive Rules 5-1-2 and 5-2-1, en.onepiece-cardgame.com/pdf/rule_comprehensive.pdf.
- The 74 single-colour and 68 dual-colour split matches the count published on multicoloured Leaders, which reads the same database.
- The total of 142 Leaders matches the count published on our One Piece card index. Both are the same database at the same date.
Where to go next
- The CardSpicy card index — every card we track, with its PSA 10 population and market history (195 cards).
- The illustrator index — every artist behind those cards, card by card (110 artists).
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