In Dragon Ball Fusion World, deck building starts with a single card, and that card constrains almost everything that follows. It is the Leader, it is held separately from the rest of the deck, and it is the reason two players can build decks from the same card pool that have nothing to do with each other. CardSpicy sets out what a Leader is, what it does, and how to read one before you build around it.
Quick answer
A Leader is a single card that sits outside your main deck and begins the game in play. It has a colour, a power value and two sides — a starting side and an awakened side — and the colour is the important part for deck building, because every Battle card and Extra card in your deck must share at least one colour with it. Choose the Leader first, then build. Nothing else in the game restricts a deck as hard as that one card does.
What makes a Leader different from a Battle card
A Battle card is drawn, played, attacks and, in most cases, eventually leaves. A Leader is always there: it starts the game in play, it does not come out of the deck, and it is not one of the fifty to sixty cards you shuffle. It is better understood as the piece of board state you begin with than as a card in hand.
Two properties of a Leader matter when you are choosing one. The first is its colour, which sets the legal colours for the rest of the deck. The second is that a Leader has two printed sides, and the second one is reached during play. The awakened side usually changes the Leader’s power and its printed effect, which is why a Leader that looks unremarkable on its front can be the centre of a deck once it flips.
How the colour rule actually restricts you
The rule is published in the rule manual and it is short: every card in your main deck must share at least one colour with your Leader. A red Leader means a red deck. A Leader that is printed in more than one colour opens up both, and that is why multi-colour Leaders are a design event rather than a cosmetic variation — the publisher brought multi-colour Leaders back with the Masters B32 anniversary set, and each time the mechanic returns it widens the pool of legal decks.
There is a second construction limit worth stating in the same breath: you may run no more than four copies of any card with the same card number. Between the colour rule and the four-copy rule, the decisions left open to a deck builder are which colour to play, how many of each card to run, and how the deck wins. The colour is fixed by the Leader.
The deck building basics walk through the rest of construction; this page is about the card you pick before any of that.
Reading a Leader line-up
Leaders are printed as a line within each set, and the line is fixed in size. The Fusion World set FB11, for example, prints five Leaders: Son Goku, a Trunks and Son Gohan pairing, Goku Black, a Shallot and Giblet pairing, and Bardock. A store event that restricts which Leaders are legal publishes that specific list, and a restricted format is the clearest illustration of how much a Leader defines a deck — removing five cards from legal play changes what the whole event looks like.
Leaders also carry the top of the treatment ladder. Masters introduced a Special Leader Rare tier as a distinct rarity above the ordinary Leader print, and Fusion World began printing a Super Alt-Art treatment specifically for Leader cards, marked by artwork built around the awakened side. If you are pricing a Leader, the treatment it carries is likely to matter more than the fact that it is a Leader.
What we will not tell you
CardSpicy will not publish a tier list of which Leader is best, because that changes with the format, the ban list and the event, and because we cannot verify tournament results well enough to rank them honestly. We will not tell you which Leader to build around, and we will not put a price on a Leader print or a number on how many were produced. The rule manual states the construction rules; the event regulations state which Leaders are legal; the printed card states its own colour, power and effect. Those are the three documents that answer a Leader question, and a guide is not a substitute for any of them. An introduction to the game the Leaders belong to is on the Dragon Ball card game overview.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Leader card in Dragon Ball Fusion World?
A single card that sits outside the main deck and begins the game in play. It has a colour, a power value and two sides, and every Battle card and Extra card in the deck must share at least one colour with it.
How many Leaders can be in a deck?
One. The Leader is not one of the fifty to sixty cards in the main deck; it is held separately and starts the game in play. That is why building a deck starts by choosing a Leader rather than by collecting cards and adding a Leader at the end.
Do all cards in a deck have to match the Leader’s colour?
Every Battle card and Extra card must share at least one colour with the Leader. A single-colour Leader restricts the deck to that colour, and a multi-colour Leader opens up more than one, which is why multi-colour Leaders change what is playable when they return to a set.
What is an awakened Leader?
A Leader is printed with two sides, and the second side is reached during play. The awakened side usually changes the Leader’s power or its printed effect, so a Leader that looks modest on its front can be the centre of a deck once it turns over. Fusion World’s Super Alt-Art treatment for Leader cards builds its artwork around that awakened side.
Can you use the same Leader as another player?
Yes. Nothing prevents two players in the same event from playing the same Leader. Where events do restrict Leaders, they publish a list of which ones are legal for that season, and that list is the authority rather than any general rule about duplicates.
Sources
Sources and further reading
- Bandai — the official DRAGON BALL SUPER CARD GAME Fusion World rule manual (Version 1.20), which sets out deck construction, the colour rule, the Leader card and the charge, main and end turn structure referred to on this page.
- Bandai — the official Fusion World and Masters product listings and published release dates for the sets named here, and the official card-list finder, which is the source of every set make-up quoted.
- Bandai — the official Fusion World and Masters tournament regulations and the published banned and restricted card list, which is the source of the format statements made here.
- CardSpicy — the Dragon Ball card index, which tracks how many cards each character has and how many carry a graded value.
Set contents, release dates and event regulations are taken from the publisher’s own announcements at the date stated and can change without notice. Prices quoted anywhere on this site are secondary-market observations and move quickly; nothing here is a valuation or an investment recommendation. Our own asking prices for the cards we hold are on each product page.
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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