Rarity is the label in the corner of a One Piece card, and it is the first thing most buyers read after the artwork. It is also the number people expect to explain how strong a card is. This page takes the 2,033 Character cards that print a power value and measures what each rarity step actually changes: not only the average power, but the cost that power is printed at, and the counter the card gives up to get there.
Quick answer
Rarity raises power, raises cost faster, and takes the counter away. From Common to Secret Rare the average Character goes from 4,410 power to 8,375, which is 90% more. Over the same step the average cost goes from 3.44 to 7.62, which is 121% more. Measured as power per point of cost, the ladder runs backwards: 1,283 at Common, 1,194 at Uncommon, 1,202 at Rare, 1,152 at Super Rare and 1,098 at Secret Rare. And the share of cards that print any counter at all falls from 87.9% to 22.5%.
So rarity is a reliable guide to how big a card gets and a poor guide to how much it gives you for the DON!! you spend. The two things it buys are a higher ceiling and a bigger body at a higher price in cost. It does not buy efficiency.
Every figure on this page is read from the official card database listed under Sources, at the date shown there. Nothing is estimated, and no price is printed anywhere on the page.
What this page counts
Bandai’s English database lists 2,185 distinct Character card numbers. Of those, 152 print no power value at all — the field is a dash on the card and in the database — so every average below is taken over the 2,033 that do print one. That distinction matters: percentages taken against 2,185 would not add up, and a page that silently divides by the larger number will report averages that are too low.
Alternate art and parallel printings share a card number with the card they reprint, so each Character is counted once. The six labels the database uses are Common, Uncommon, Rare, Super Rare, Secret Rare and Promo, and they are treated here in that order because that is the order the pool is printed in.
Two pages already published the first half of this measurement. Card power and counter lists the average power of each rarity, and the same page maps power against cost, cost band by cost band. This page does not repeat either table. It takes the next step: what the power costs, in DON!! and in counter, and what the ceiling of each tier is.
The measurement
| Rarity | Cards with a power | Average power | Average cost | Power per point of cost | Print a counter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Common | 869 | 4,410 | 3.44 | 1,283 | 87.9% |
| Uncommon | 369 | 4,312 | 3.61 | 1,194 | 86.7% |
| Rare | 391 | 4,701 | 3.91 | 1,202 | 74.9% |
| Super Rare | 271 | 6,745 | 5.86 | 1,152 | 37.6% |
| Secret Rare | 40 | 8,375 | 7.62 | 1,098 | 22.5% |
| Promo | 93 | 5,785 | 4.67 | 1,240 | 64.5% |
Read the last two columns first. Everything else on the card moves in the direction you would expect; those two do not.
Power rises 90%, cost rises 121%
Take Common as the baseline. A Secret Rare averages 8,375 power against 4,410, so the number printed in the middle-right of the card nearly doubles. That is the part everyone already knows.
The cost column moves further. 3.44 to 7.62 is 2.2 times as many DON!! per card. Put the two together and the ratio falls: 8,375 divided by 7.62 is about 1,098 power per point of cost, against 4,410 divided by 3.44, which is 1,283. A Secret Rare is 14% less efficient at converting DON!! into power than a Common is.
That is not a design flaw, it is the shape of the game. Power is not the only thing a card does, and the top of the curve is where the abilities live. But it does mean the sentence “this card is rarer, so it is better” is doing two jobs at once and only one of them survives measurement. A rarer card is larger. Whether it is better depends on whether your deck can pay 7 DON!! for one body.
For the full cost-by-cost ladder, including the mainstream value at each cost and the number of cards at the ceiling, the table on Card power and counter is the one to read. What that page does not do is hold cost constant, which is why the ratio above is calculated here.
The counter is what the higher tiers actually take
This is the sharpest number on the page. 87.9% of Commons print a counter value, which means most Common cards in your hand can be discarded during your opponent’s turn to keep a Character alive. At Rare the share is 74.9%. At Super Rare it is 37.6%. At Secret Rare it is 22.5%.
Thirty-one of the 40 Secret Rare Characters print no counter at all. So the trade at the top of the ladder is not subtle: you get a card that is worth playing on your own turn and worth very little in your hand on the opponent’s. A deck built mostly out of high-rarity cards is a deck with fewer answers when it is being attacked, and that is a structural reason why competitive lists run so many low-rarity cards regardless of what the top tier prints.
The direction of the trade is worth stating plainly, because it is easy to invert. Rarity is not buying you a card that does more; it is buying you a card that does one large thing on your turn instead of two medium things on both players’ turns. If you are building for the first time, the deck building rules cover how many cards of each kind a legal deck holds, and the counter maths behind that is on the power and counter page.
Rarity does not set the ceiling
The average rises steadily. The ceiling does not.
| Rarity | Highest power | Cards at 9,000 or more | Cards at 10,000 or more |
|---|---|---|---|
| Common | 10,000 | 26 | 14 |
| Uncommon | 10,000 | 3 | 2 |
| Rare | 12,000 | 8 | 3 |
| Super Rare | 13,000 | 56 | 34 |
| Secret Rare | 13,000 | 18 | 13 |
Fourteen Common Characters reach 10,000 power. A Common can be as large as anything a Super Rare prints short of the two 13,000 cards. EB02-004 Don Accino is one of them: cost 8, 10,000 power, Common, and it still prints a 1,000 counter. OP12-005 Shiki, OP14-101 Oars, OP05-044 John Giant, ST14-012 Monkey.D.Luffy and ST26-004 General Franky are in the same group.
Two Rares reach 12,000: OP09-051 Buggy and OP11-073 Charlotte Linlin, both cost 10. That is the same height as the Super Rare band at cost 10, printed at a lower rarity. So the ceiling of a tier is not a rule about that tier, it is a statement about how many cards in it happen to be large.
What rarity reliably does is shift the middle of the distribution. The bottom three tiers — Common, Uncommon, Rare — all average between 4,312 and 4,701, a band of 9%. The top two average 6,745 and 8,375. If you only know a card is Common, you know it is very unlikely to be larger than 6,000. If you know it is Secret Rare, you know the opposite. That is a probabilistic statement, not a cap.
Uncommon is the trough
The one place the ladder breaks is between the first two rungs. Uncommon averages 4,312 power against 4,410 for Common, which is 2% lower, and 1,194 power per point of cost against 1,283, which is 7% lower. Uncommon also prints 86.7% counters against 87.9%. On all three measures, the Uncommon pool is very slightly worse than the Common pool.
That is not noise at these sample sizes — 869 cards against 369. It is the effect of what each tier is for. Commons carry the cheap filler and the utility bodies, which is where the high counter rates come from. Uncommons carry a large share of the mid-cost cards that do not quite qualify for Rare, and mid-cost cards sit between the cheap counters and the large finishers without being especially good at either. Anyone sorting a bulk box by rarity and assuming value increases with every step will find the second box worth less than the first.
Promo sits between Rare and Super Rare
The five numbered tiers are not the whole ladder. Promo cards — the single-card releases given out at events, in magazines or with products — average 5,785 power at 4.67 cost, which is 1,240 power per point of cost. That is higher than Rare (1,202) and higher than Super Rare (1,152), and it puts promos second only to Common on efficiency.
There are only 93 of them, so this is a small pool and one product line can move the average. But the reason is easy to see: a promo is printed as a standalone card, not as a slot in a booster spread, so there is no reason for it to be filler. It is also the tier most often reprinted into other products, which the reprint list tracks.
Where a promo sits on the collector side is a different question from where it sits on this table. SP cards and manga rares are treatments rather than tiers, and the site tracks them separately on Secret Rare parallels and Treasure Rares. Rarity as printed and rarity as collected are two different ladders, and conflating them is how a card gets described as strong when it is only scarce.
What to do with this
- Use rarity to guess size, not quality. It predicts the average power of a card reasonably well from Rare upward and predicts nothing about whether the card is worth its cost.
- Compare cards at the same cost, then compare rarity. A 6,000-power Rare at cost 5 and a 6,000-power Super Rare at cost 5 are the same body; the difference is in the card text.
- Treat a counter as a real cost. The jump from 74.9% to 37.6% between Rare and Super Rare is the largest single move on this page and the one that changes how a deck plays.
- Do not assume a Common cannot be big. Fourteen of them are at 10,000 power or more, and one of those still counters for 1,000.
- Check the promo pool before dismissing it. On power per point of cost it beats both Rare and Super Rare.
For the individual cards behind these averages, the character pages list them one by one: every Monkey.D.Luffy card is the largest single-character pool, every Buggy card includes both of the 12,000-power Rares at cost 10, and every Edward.Newgate card covers the Leader side of the same character.
Related reading
- Card power and counter — the cost-by-cost ladder and the counter share at each cost.
- The shape of the Leader pool — the same kind of measurement applied to the 142 Leaders, where power turns out not to vary at all.
- The six colours of DON!! — what colour constrains, and the all-card colour counts.
- How many One Piece cards are there — the population these percentages are taken from.
- What gives a One Piece card its value — why the market price of a card and its printed power are separate questions.
Frequently asked questions
Does a rarer One Piece card mean a stronger card?
It means a larger card, not a more efficient one. From Common to Secret Rare the average power rises 90%, from 4,410 to 8,375, but the average cost rises 121%, from 3.44 to 7.62. Measured as power per point of cost the number falls from 1,283 to 1,098, so a Secret Rare gives you 14% less body per DON!! than a Common does.
Can a Common card be as big as a Secret Rare?
Not quite as big, but closer than most people expect. Fourteen Common Characters reach 10,000 power, while the Secret Rare ceiling is 13,000 and only two cards in the game reach it. Two Rares print at 12,000, the same height as the Super Rare band at cost 10, so rarity shifts the middle of the distribution rather than setting a hard ceiling.
Why do high-rarity One Piece cards have fewer counters?
Because counter and power compete for the same card. 87.9% of Common Characters print a counter and only 22.5% of Secret Rares do, and 31 of the 40 Secret Rare Characters print no counter at all. A high-rarity card is built to do one large thing on your own turn rather than to be discarded on the opponents turn.
Which rarity is the worst value in the One Piece card pool?
Uncommon, narrowly. It averages 4,312 power against 4,410 for Common, 1,194 power per point of cost against 1,283, and 86.7% counters against 87.9%. All three measures put it very slightly below Common, which is the effect of Uncommon carrying a large share of mid-cost cards that are neither cheap counters nor large finishers.
Are promo cards stronger than the numbered rarities?
On efficiency, yes. The 93 Promo Characters average 5,785 power at 4.67 cost, which is 1,240 power per point of cost. That beats Rare at 1,202 and Super Rare at 1,152, and puts promos second only to Common. The pool is small enough that one product line can move the average, so treat it as a tendency rather than a rule.
Sources
Sources and method
- Character card data read from the official ONE PIECE CARD GAME English card database, en.onepiece-cardgame.com/cardlist, retrieved 2026-10-21 across all 60 series. 2,185 distinct Character card numbers were found, of which 2,033 print a power value and 152 print a dash.
- Power, cost, counter and rarity are the printed values recorded by that database, not inferred from card text. Alternate art and parallel printings share a card number with the card they reprint and are counted once.
- Average power is the arithmetic mean of the printed power of the cards that print one. Power per point of cost is that mean divided by the mean printed cost over the same cards. Percentages in the counter column are taken over the same denominator.
- The count of 2,185 Character cards matches the figure published on Card power and counter, which reads the same database at the same date.
- The rarity labels and their order are the ones printed on the cards and carried by the database. Promo is a distribution channel rather than a rung on the ladder and is reported separately for that reason.
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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