Black Luffy EB05 Decklist: 11-3 Into Rocks, 1-8 Into Buggy

We counted every OP17-079OP17-079Shop on TCGplayer Leader list from the ten [EB05]-tagged Standard events on Limitless Play with posted decklists, October 19 to November 9, 2026: 15 lists from 6 players out of 618 entrants. It went 31-35 against other leaders (47%) and never reached a top 8 in those events. The best Swiss finish was 9th, reached twice by two different players. The tracker opdecks.xyz counts differently: its Black Luffy page shows 28 first places and 37 top 8 finishes across 43 lists, among them an English Standard Battle won on November 2 and Japanese Flagship and EGB events. Those events are outside our sample, which is ten online Swiss events and counts the final Swiss standing, so "never reached a top 8" holds for our ten events only. Smaller untagged events are not counted (see the last section).

Hero image credit: Bandai, official sample images of OP17-079, OP17-119 and OP17-081 from the One Piece TCG English card list.

The 50 cards of the best-placed list

Tadomari finished 9th of 64 at ChinoizeCup #127 on October 26 with 4-2. It is one of the two best finishes with this Leader, and the same 50 cards went into ChinoizeCup #128 the next day. Prices are not in the table; we did not pull them for this piece.

The 15 lists share a lot. Any two of them have 42 of 50 cards in common on average, and the least similar pair still shares 36. Gerd, Loki and Usopp are at four copies in every one of the 15 lists, and Nico Robin and the 8-cost Luffy average 3.93 copies. The public tournament database opdecks.xyz shows the same core in its 43 Black Luffy lists, which mix Japanese and English events: Gerd, Loki, Luffy, Nico Robin, Zoro and Usopp are in all 43.

How the cost-12 plan works

The Leader gives every Character with cost 12 or more Blocker. Almost nothing costs 12 on its own, so the deck cheats the number: Rodo, Gerd, Saul and Loki add +12 to their own cost, which turns a 1-cost body into a 13-cost Blocker. Pirates Docking Six only gains +6, which makes it 11, and that is why Thousand Sunny is in the deck: the Stage adds the last +1. Brock Lee made the same point in his August 26 OP17 guide. The 2-cost Usopp, Sanji, Robin and Zoro are small bodies that grow by 3000 power once one of those big-cost Characters is out. We cover that engine card by card in our OP-17 Black Luffy guide; this page is about what happened to it after EB-05.

Image credit: Bandai, official sample images from the One Piece TCG English card list.

Who it beats

Chart: Shonen TCG. Source: Limitless Play standings and pairings, ten EB-05 events, October 19 to November 9, 2026.

Blue Rocks is the deck to want. The 11-3 came from three players (DDHDTV 4-0, trocheesy 5-1, Tadomari 2-0) and the three losses from Ishigoat and BigWes15, who both finished with losing records, and trocheesy at ChinoizeCup #133 on November 9. Other people see the same thing from the Rocks side. The METAHUB channel's Rocks deck guide, published October 1, includes the line "And your worst match-up? Black Luffy, 34%." That is the video maker's count of ladder games, not Rocks players' own words. Car D. Kaizoku's OP17.5 week 3 analysis of ladder games, published October 18, lists Rocks as "unfavored into Black Luffy, Pudding, and Imu." Three separate counts, two of them from the online ladder, put the same pairing in the same direction.

Yellow Enel was 5-1 and Luffy & Ace 3-1 in our events, and Purple Kaido 2-0. Car D. Kaizoku had called Enel a good answer to the Elbaph decks in the same video, so the Enel result is where our sample disagrees with a player we respect. It is six games.

Who beats it

Buggy is 1-8, from four different pilots (Tadomari, DDHDTV, trocheesy and Cadazzas); the one win is trocheesy's at ChinoizeCup #133 on November 9, after eight straight losses. Red/Green Luffy is 2-9. Red/Purple Luffy beat it 3-0 and Rosinante went 2-1 against it. Those four decks are 26 of Black Luffy's 66 games.

Chart: Shonen TCG. Source: Limitless Play standings and pairings, ten EB-05 events, October 19 to November 9, 2026. The last period has four events.

The trend runs the wrong way, because Red/Green Luffy was growing. It was 4 of 128 entrants at ChinoizeCup #124 on October 19 and 19 of 63 at #130 on November 2, more than the 15 Rocks decks at the same event. Black Luffy's games against it went 1-0 in the first three events, 1-5 in the next three and 0-4 in the last four. Against Rocks it went 3-2, 4-0, 4-1. The deck's own share went the other way: 7 of 272 entrants in the first three events, 5 of 150 in the second three and 3 of 196 in the last four. Tadomari's 9th-place list lost twice, both to Red/Green Luffy, and won the other four against Enel (twice), Luffy & Ace and Teach. For how Red/Green Luffy got that big, see our EB-05 matchup chart.

What the other lists play

The core is not the question. The last ten or so slots are, and three of the flex cards were new to the deck: two from EB-05 and one from OP-17.

Image credit: Bandai, official sample images from the One Piece TCG English card list.

Ripley (EB05-047), a 4-cost Giant that gains +12 cost and recurs a cheap Character from your trash, is in 9 of the 15 lists. Yamato (EB05-046) is in 11 and Gum-Gum Kong Gun (OP17-098) in 8. The players who ran Ripley went 15-21 and those who did not went 16-14. With Yamato it is 19-24 against 12-11, and with Kong Gun 16-20 against 15-15. We would not read any of that as a verdict on the cards, since six players produced all 15 lists and trocheesy alone has 7 of them. What it does say is that the EB-05 additions did not turn this deck around. Brock Lee praised Kong Gun against Rocks in his guide, because it K.O.s two Characters with cost 6 or less once a cost-12 body is out, and he called it especially strong when Rocks has no removal protection up. Only about half the lists play it.

What we'd do

We would play Black Luffy only if your table is Rocks and not much else. The reason is the pairing arithmetic: Red/Green Luffy outnumbered Rocks at ChinoizeCup #130 and beat Black Luffy in 9 of 11 games, and Buggy beat it in 8 of 9, so in a mixed field you are more likely to meet one of those two than to meet Rocks. If you do play it, copy Tadomari's 50 cards. They tied for the best finish, and the deck has almost no free slots to argue about. If Red/Green Luffy is on your table, bring a different deck.

What we don't know

This is online best-of-one Swiss play. 15 lists from 6 players is a small sample, the 1-8 against Buggy is nine games, and one player produced 7 of the lists, so a handful of pilots drive every number above. We do not know why Buggy and Red/Green Luffy beat this deck. Card text does not give an obvious reason, and we are not going to guess one. The METAHUB numbers are from the online ladder and mostly from games before the Mihawk ban, and Car D. Kaizoku's are ladder games for the top 20 percent of players, so neither is a tournament result. The opdecks.xyz share (2.3% of 43 lists) mixes Japanese and English events, while ours (2.4%) is ten English online events. We have no paper results, no events after November 9, no untagged or EXTRA-format events, and no prices for the list.

How we checked: decklists and pairings come from the Limitless Play API for ten events (Oct 19, 20, 22, 26, 27, 29 and Nov 2, 3, 4, 9). Games count only when both leaders are known and differ and one player won. Card text comes from the Bandai English card list. The video quotes were checked against the transcripts of the videos linked above. The script for the counts is scripts/sims/optcg-blackluffy-eb05-rounds.py in our repository. For the set itself, see our EB-05 card list.