One Piece Card Colours: What the Six Colours Change, Measured

By CardSpicy Founder · October 21, 2026

The six colours of the One Piece Card Game are the main constraint on deck building, and they are usually described in words: Red is aggressive, Blue is about tempo, Black removes things, Yellow heals. Those descriptions are true and they are also unmeasurable. This page measures the part that is not: the card counts, the cost curve and the counter share of each colour, across all 2,185 Character cards.

Quick answer

Colour does not change how big a card gets. It changes when the card arrives. The six colours are within 23 cards of each other in size, and within 398 power of each other on average — figures already published on Card power and counter. What that page could not show is the cost curve. Red is the only colour whose median Character costs 3 DON!!; the other five all sit at 4. Red also converts DON!! into power at 1,257 per point of cost, against 1,196 for Yellow and 1,197 for Purple — a 5% edge, which is small in itself and is the largest difference between any two colours in the pool.

One structural fact makes the rest of the page easier to read: there is no such thing as a dual-colour Character card. All 2,185 Characters print exactly one colour. Dual colour exists only on Leader cards, where 68 of the 142 carry two.

Every figure is read from the official card database listed under Sources. Nothing is estimated and no price appears on the page.

What this page counts

The population is the same 2,185 distinct Character card numbers used across the site, deduplicated so that alternate art and parallel printings count once. Every one of them carries a single colour in the database, and no Character carries two, which is why the counts below add up to 2,185 exactly.

This is a deliberately narrower cut than the one on The Six Colours of DON!!, which counts every card type — Events and Stages included — and counts a dual-colour Leader once for each of its colours. If you want the all-card view of the pool, that is the page. This one holds the card type constant so that colour is the only variable left.

The consequence is worth stating: because Leaders are excluded, nothing on this page is about which colour has the better Leaders. That comparison is on the shape of the Leader pool, where the spread across colours is 40 slots to 32.

The counts are nearly even

The gap between the largest colour and the smallest is 23 cards, which is 6.5% of Red and 0.9% of a 2,185-card pool. No colour has been starved and none has been favoured to a degree that would show up in a deck build. If you are choosing a colour to build around, the size of its pool is not a reason to prefer one.

That is a more useful finding than it sounds. It means every argument about colour in this game has to be about what the cards do, because the supply is even. It also means a set release that adds ten cards to one colour is not rebalancing the pool, it is nudging it.

Red arrives a DON!! earlier

The cost curve is where the colours separate.

Five of the six colours have a median cost of 4. Red is the only one at 3, and its average cost is the lowest in the pool at 3.73 against Purple’s 4.25. That is a gap of 0.52 DON!! per card, or 14%.

Fourteen per cent does not sound like much until you put it in a deck. In a 50-card deck, drawing a Red card rather than a Purple one at the same rarity means the average card in your hand is half a DON!! cheaper to play. Over the first four turns, that is the difference between playing one card and two. This is the numerical version of the word “aggressive”: Red does not hit harder, it hits sooner.

Note that the average power column moves in the opposite direction. Red has the lowest average power in the pool at 4,692 and the highest efficiency at 1,257. Purple has the highest average power at 5,090 and sits at 1,197, one point off the lowest in the pool. The two colours are two ends of the same trade, and the trade is cost. A colour that pays more per card gets a bigger card; a colour that pays less gets a smaller one sooner.

The middle of the table is flat enough to ignore. Black 1,227, Green 1,223 and Blue 1,217 are within 1% of each other. If you are choosing between those three, the numbers on this page will not help you and the card text will.

Yellow counters most, Blue least

The counter column has a wider spread than the efficiency column, though it is still narrow: 79.8% of Yellow Characters print a counter, against 72.2% of Blue. The order runs Yellow, Black, Green, Red, Purple, Blue.

The gap between the best and worst is 7.6 percentage points, so roughly one Character in thirteen behaves differently in your hand depending on which colour it is. That is not nothing, and it lines up with how the colours are usually described: Yellow is the colour that survives, Blue is the colour that answers on its own turn instead of the opponent’s. But it is a tendency inside a deck, not a rule you can build around on its own.

If counter rate is the thing you care about most, colour is a weaker lever than rarity. The same measurement by rarity runs from 87.9% at Common to 22.5% at Secret Rare, which is a swing seventeen times larger. That comparison is on the rarity page.

Two colours reach 13,000, four stop at 12,000

The ceiling is almost as even as the count.

Both 13,000-power Characters are Gol.D.Roger: OP09-118 in Red and OP13-064 in Purple. No other colour has a card above 12,000, and no colour is missing one at 12,000 either.

The Secret Rare column is more interesting than the ceiling column. Yellow has eight, the most of any colour; Red has five, the fewest. Across 40 Secret Rare Characters in total, that is a spread of three cards — again small, and again consistent with a pool that is deliberately balanced by colour rather than by power.

Where colours do diverge sharply is in their card text, which no table on this site tries to score. The site tracks that side of the game by mechanic and by character instead: the trait index groups Characters by what they belong to, and the character pages list the same cards by name, such as every Nami card or every Roronoa Zoro card.

Colour is a deck building constraint, not a power setting

The rules reason is simple and is worth separating from the numbers. A deck may only contain cards in the colours its Leader prints, which is why the colour of a card determines whether you can play it at all. That rule is the subject of what a Leader decides, and the 15 possible pairs are catalogued on multicoloured Leaders.

What the tables above add is that once a card is legal, its colour tells you very little else. The four things colour does not determine, measured across 2,185 cards:

• How many cards exist. 353 to 376, a 6.5% spread.
• How big the cards get. 4,692 to 5,090 average power, an 8.5% spread, and no colour is missing from the top band.
• How often a card counters. 72.2% to 79.8%, a 7.6-point spread.
• Whether a card is high rarity. Five to eight Secret Rares per colour.

The one thing it does determine, at least in the data, is the price of a card in DON!!: 3.73 average for Red against 4.25 for Purple. Everything else about colour is in the text box.

What this means when you pick a colour

• Do not pick a colour for its card count. The pools are within 23 cards of each other and always have been.
• Pick Red if you want the curve to start earlier. It is the only colour with a median cost of 3, and it is 14% cheaper per card than Purple on average.
• Do not expect a colour to give your deck more counters. The whole spread is 7.6 points, which is smaller than the gap between one rarity step.
• Read the second colour on a Leader, not on a Character. Characters are single-colour without exception; the second colour only ever appears on the Leader, which is the card the deck is built around.
• For the cheapest end of every colour, the 31 one-cost Characters that reach 3,000 power are listed on the one-cost page, and Red supplies ten of them.

Deck construction itself — the 50-card count, the four-copy limit, the Leader rule — is set out on the deck building rules page. Which products a colour first appeared in is on the starter deck list, since a large share of every colour debuted in an ST product rather than a booster.

Related reading

• Card power and counter — the cost-by-cost ladder and the rarity table this page builds on.
• What rarity buys — the same efficiency measure applied to the six rarity labels.
• The six colours of DON!! — what each colour does, and the all-card counts.
• The shape of the Leader pool — life, power and colour across all 142 Leaders.
• Multicoloured Leaders — all 15 colour pairs and what a second colour costs.

Frequently asked questions

Are there any dual-colour Character cards in One Piece?

No. All 2,185 Character cards in the pool print exactly one colour. Dual colour exists only on Leader cards, where 68 of the 142 carry two. That is why the colour counts on this site add up to the full Character population without any double counting.

Which One Piece colour is the fastest?

Red, on the cost curve. It is the only colour whose median Character costs 3 DON!!, while the other five all sit at 4, and its average cost is 3.73 against 4.25 for Purple. Red also converts DON!! into power at 1,257 per point of cost, the highest of the six, even though it has the lowest average power at 4,692.

Does colour affect how much power an One Piece card has?

Barely. Average power runs from 4,692 in Red to 5,090 in Purple, a spread of 398 on a scale that reaches 13,000, which is about 8.5%. Both colours reach the 13,000 ceiling and no colour is missing a 12,000-power card, so colour shifts the average without setting the ceiling.

Which colour has the most counters?

Yellow, at 79.8% of its Characters printing a counter, followed by Black at 77.6% and Green at 77.4%. Blue is lowest at 72.2%. The whole spread is 7.6 percentage points, which is much smaller than the gap between Common and Secret Rare, so rarity is the stronger lever on counter rate.

Is one colour better stocked than the others?

No. The six colours hold between 353 and 376 Character cards each, a gap of 23 cards or 6.5%. Yellow is smallest at 353 and Red largest at 376. Every colour also holds between five and eight Secret Rares, so no colour is short of high-rarity cards.

Sources

Sources and method

1. 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, and every one prints a single colour.
2. Colour, cost, power and counter 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.
3. Average cost is the arithmetic mean of the printed cost; median cost is the middle value of the same list. Power per point of cost is the mean printed power divided by the mean printed cost over the same cards.
4. The share printing a counter is taken over the Characters of that colour that print a power value, so that cards with no printed power do not inflate the denominator.
5. The rule that a deck may contain only cards in the colours its Leader prints is from the ONE PIECE CARD GAME Comprehensive Rules 5-1-2, en.onepiece-cardgame.com/pdf/rule_comprehensive.pdf.
6. The 2,185-card population and the 4,692-to-5,090 average power range match the figures published on Card power and counter, which reads 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).