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Ask a room full of One Piece TCG players to picture "Red/Green Luffy" and you'll get two different cards back, depending on how long they've been playing. If you're new to the game and still working through basics like DON!! cards and battle timing, our how to play One Piece TCG guide is worth reading alongside this one, since the leader ability we're about to break down leans directly on how DON!! works. For everyone else, the short answer is that "Red/Green Luffy" today almost always means the OP-13 leader, and that's the card this guide is built around.

That said, we're not going to pretend the older card doesn't exist or isn't worth understanding. Plenty of players either started with the original Romance Dawn version of this leader or are curious how it compares now that the "Straw Hat Crew" leader design has evolved over more than a dozen sets. So this guide covers both: the current OP13-001 leader in depth, since that's the one worth building a competitive deck around today, and the original OP01-003 leader for context on how far the design has come and why it's now best treated as a collector's or nostalgia pick rather than a tournament option.

Meet OP13-001: The Current Red/Green Luffy Leader

The Luffy most competitive players are talking about is Monkey.D.Luffy (001), card number OP13-001, a Red/Green dual-color leader from the OP-13 "Carrying On His Will" set. He's a fairly standard leader statline on paper -- 4 Life, 5000 Power -- which puts him in the same general bracket as most top-tier leaders rather than standing out on raw numbers alone. What makes him worth an entire deck archetype isn't his stats, it's the leader ability printed underneath them, which we'll walk through in detail in the next section.

Being Red/Green means OP13-001 pulls from two card pools at once, which is standard practice for dual-color leaders in this game -- if the whole color-pairing system is new to you, our color identity guide lays out what each of the six colors tends to reward before you start picking a leader. Red and Green together generally lean toward aggression backed by some measure of stability, and OP13-001's ability fits that lane by giving you a way to punish opponents who attack into what looks like a weaker board.

How the Leader Ability Actually Works

The ability reads (per card database records): "[DON!! x1] [On Your Opponent's Attack] If you have 5 or less active DON!! cards, you may rest any number of your DON!! cards. For every DON!! card rested this way, this Leader or up to 1 of your 'Straw Hat Crew' type Characters gains +2000 power during this battle."

Breaking that down piece by piece: the trigger is "[On Your Opponent's Attack]," meaning this isn't something you activate on your own turn -- it fires specifically when your opponent declares an attack against you. The condition is that you need 5 or fewer active DON!! cards at that moment, which in practice usually means you've already committed some DON!! elsewhere or you're playing from a position where your board looks lighter than it is. From there, you rest however many DON!! you choose, and each one rested adds +2000 power to either Luffy himself or a single Straw Hat Crew character, for that battle only. If you're still getting comfortable with what "resting" a DON!! card actually costs you turn to turn, that's covered in the DON!! section of our rules guide.

The practical upshot is a big, sudden power swing that only shows up when someone else initiates combat against you. Rest three active DON!! and you're looking at +6000 power added to a blocker or to Luffy himself, which can flip an attack from a favorable trade for your opponent into a very unfavorable one.

Why This Ability Is a Genuine Combat Trick

It's worth being precise about what kind of card this makes OP13-001. This isn't a passive buff or a once-per-game bomb -- it's a repeatable combat trick that lives entirely on defense. Every time your opponent attacks while you're sitting at 5 or fewer active DON!!, you get to decide, after seeing the attack, whether the power swing is worth spending your DON!! on. That's a meaningfully different design than leaders whose value is baked into a static bonus or a one-time effect, and it's part of why this leader gets discussed alongside other top options on our meta tier list.

The strategic tension is that resting DON!! defensively means those DON!! aren't available to power your own attacks or abilities the following turn. Good Red/Green Luffy play is largely about judging when a defensive DON!! rest is worth more than what you'd have done with that DON!! on offense -- a decision-tree that's common to reactive, board-protection leaders across the game. Our strategy hub has more on how to think about DON!! efficiency in general, which applies directly here.

Deck-Building Direction: What OP13-001 Rewards

We're not going to hand you a specific 60-card list here -- card pools shift with every new set, and a decklist printed today can be stale within a few months. What's more durable is understanding the direction this leader's ability actually pushes your deck-building decisions in, and building from there using current tools like our first competitive deck guide.

Since the power boost can go onto "any Straw Hat Crew type Character," this leader has a natural affinity for Straw Hat Crew tribal cards -- characters that share that type are the ones who directly benefit from the ability beyond Luffy himself. It also rewards a slightly more conservative approach to DON!! usage than a pure aggro deck: if you're spending every DON!! the moment it's available, you'll rarely have DON!! left to rest defensively when your opponent swings at you. That's a real deck-building trade-off, not a minor detail, and it's worth thinking through before you commit to a full DON!! curve. Because the leader card itself will typically be a higher-rarity print, it's also worth understanding what you're actually holding -- our rarity guide explains how leader rarities are structured. And whatever you build around, sleeve it properly -- a leader you're playing every game deserves better protection than whatever came in the starter box, and our sleeves and deck box guide covers what to look for.

The Original Red/Green Luffy: OP01-003 and Why It's a Nostalgia Pick Now

Before OP13-001, there was Monkey.D.Luffy (003), OP01-003 -- the Red/Green leader from the very first set, Romance Dawn, which kicked off the whole game. It shares the same Life 4, Power 5000 statline, but its ability worked completely differently -- it reads (per card database records): "[Activate:Main] [Once Per Turn] (4) (You may rest the specified number of DON!! cards in your cost area): Set up to 1 of your 'Supernova' or 'Straw Hat Crew' type Character cards with a cost of 5 or less as active. It gains +1000 power during this turn." That's an on-your-own-turn effect for un-resting and buffing a character, rather than a defensive DON!! conversion.

It's important to be upfront here: OP01-003 carries an errata notation on current card databases, meaning the ability text quoted above may not exactly match how the card reads or functions in official play today. We haven't been able to pin down the precise nature of that change from here, so if you're picking this card up to actually play it, check the current printed card or an up-to-date card database entry rather than relying solely on the wording above. That uncertainty alone is a good reason to treat OP01-003 as a historical or nostalgia option rather than a current competitive pick -- it's the leader a lot of long-time players' first decks were built around, back when the game's whole card pool was a fraction of what it is now. If you're curious how the set that introduced this card fits into the game's broader timeline, our set history guide walks through OP01 through OP17. And if you want an entry point into the game that's actually built for how the format looks today rather than how it looked at launch, our starter deck rankings and best starter deck for beginners guide are better places to start than chasing down an errata'd leader for sentimental reasons alone.

Red/Green Luffy vs. Green Mihawk and Purple Enel

One Piece TCG doesn't have a single "best" leader so much as a handful of top options that reward genuinely different playstyles, and it's worth seeing where OP13-001 sits next to two other leaders we cover in depth on this site. Green Dracule Mihawk, the subject of our Green Mihawk budget deck guide, leans into mono-Green's control and durability tendencies -- it's a leader built around grinding out advantage over a longer game rather than swinging for a single big turn. Purple Enel, covered in our Purple Enel deck guide, plays into Purple's disruption and hand-attack identity, aiming to strip resources away from your opponent before they can execute their plan.

Red/Green Luffy occupies a different lane again: it's fundamentally reactive on defense while still carrying Red's aggressive tendencies on offense, which makes it a leader for players who like to bait attacks and punish them rather than either grinding for card advantage or disrupting the opponent's hand directly. None of these three approaches is objectively "correct" -- they're different answers to the same design question, and which one clicks with you usually comes down to playstyle preference more than raw power level. Our color identity guide is a good next stop if you want to see how these three leaders' color pairings compare to the rest of the field before you commit to one.

Who Should Play This Leader

Red/Green Luffy tends to appeal to players who enjoy reactive, decision-heavy combat over straightforward beatdown. If you like the feeling of holding resources back and waiting for your opponent to commit before you punish them, this leader's whole identity is built around that moment. It also naturally appeals to players who want their deck to feel thematically tied to the Straw Hat Crew specifically, since the ability's secondary target is built around that character type rather than a generic buff.

If competitive events are part of your goal with this leader, it's worth reading our organized play and championship guide before you invest heavily in a specific build, since tournament formats and legal card pools can shift the calculus around any leader. And because a leader card like OP13-001 is one you'll likely want to acquire as a single rather than pull from packs, it's worth knowing what you're buying -- our guide to spotting fake cards and our grading guide are both useful before you spend real money on a single leader card, whether you're buying it raw or graded.

On the flip side, this probably isn't the right leader if you find reactive play frustrating rather than satisfying. Some players would much rather have a straightforward game plan they execute every turn than a leader whose best moments depend on what the opponent chooses to do. There's nothing wrong with that preference -- it just points you toward a different leader, whether that's one of the two we've already mentioned or another option covered in our broader tier list.

Getting Started: Where Red/Green Luffy Fits in Your Collection

If you've decided OP13-001 is the leader you want to build around, the next practical question is how to actually acquire the pieces -- and whether that means booster boxes, singles, or some mix of both. That's a bigger question than this guide can cover on its own, so we've broken it down separately in our booster box vs. singles guide, which walks through the trade-offs for players building toward a specific leader rather than opening packs to see what they get.

Once you're holding cards worth trading or selling -- whether that's extras from packs you opened chasing this leader, or cards from a deck you're moving away from -- do it carefully. Our guide to trading and selling One Piece cards safely covers the basics of not getting scammed on either side of a trade. And if you're curious how a leader like this one sits relative to the game's biggest chase cards in general, our most valuable One Piece cards guide is a useful reality check on where the real money in this game tends to concentrate.