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Roronoa Zoro, the famous swordsman of the Straw Hat Crew is a leader introduced during the [OP-01] of the One Piece Card Game. He has been part of the metagame since the beginning.
Main Strategy
Often described as an easy aggressive deck because of the simplicity of the effect: you put one Don on your leader and you swing at your opponent. Why do complicated things when you can just hit for the win? Each 5k attack is either a “discard 1” or “take 1 damage”. In the early game you want to do these little 5k swings to reduce the hand size of the opponent. Later you will strike with bigger attacks (7k, 9, 11k?!) to hit the opponent leader’s life.
However you can’t reduce Zoro to only aggressive playstyle. Zoro is the perfect midrange deck, he can be either proactive or reactive. You will have to adapt to the match up and situations to be the best Zoro player. The color red has a lot of control on small characters allowing you to quickly gain the control of the game and impose your tempo.
Deck Building
The key point of Zoro deckbuilding is searchers, they allow you to take one card out of five of a specific archetype (Nami, Izo, Dadan, Buggy …). Zoro wants to play a lot of them to have a large board (allowing him to maximize the leader’s effect) and not be out of fuel.
Zoro, like other red decks, was hit by two ban lists during OP3 and OP4 reducing Marco4, Marco5, Edward Newgate and Radical beam to only one copy in the deck; it was not enough, we also had Curly Dadan and Nami banned. Nevertheless, Zoro, with his generic effect, can adapt and fit with all Metagames. If one package is hit, just take another one and continue on your way. We saw it with the first ban list, the second was… too much. But now with OP5 and the revert on the two red ban list, Zoro can be played at his full potential!
At this moment, there are two main ways to build the deck: Izo and Nami.
Nami will use the Straw Hat Crew engine to be more aggressive and end games quickly, you have access to the powerful rush cards like the characters Zoro op1 and Luffy st1. Nami can also grab event cards like Radical Beam or Guard Point; good cards to defend but you lose the easy access of Marco5.
Izo will use the Whitebeard Pirates to have a better control of the game and have more consistency. Your strategy is to play Marco5 every game to control the board and have a reliable character. Izo and the event Whitebeard Pirates will directly take Marco5, Buggy will grab the event and Curly Dadan will use her effect on Izo and Buggy. Do you understand? Always Marco on 5.
When it comes to choose the ratio of the cards in your deck, often, it's better to play x4 cards. Yet with so many searchers you can have a toolbox and take the better option for the game. Do you need an event? Do you need a solid character?
Don’t forget that cards often have a counter so playing different cards allows you to adapt the situation and discard the useless card instead of having 2 of the same card in hand.
Exemple of Decklists
Nami Zoro
Izo Zoro: With the Whitebeard Pirates Toolbox
