Purple Kaido: EB05 Deck Guide

1. Introduction

Purple Kaido is the only deck in the format that gets to play a different game from everyone else, and the price of admission is that you have to hit one specific turn.

Every other leader spends DON!! and gets it back on a schedule the rules set. Kaido spends DON!! as a cost, permanently returning it to the DON!! deck, and then takes it straight back with an engine built out of Characters. Once that engine is running, your leader's ability is free every single turn, your 12000 bodies arrive two turns before anyone expects them, and you end turns with active DON!! still up for counter events while your opponent has tapped out. It is the closest thing the format has to cheating.

The catch has always been that the engine has a single load-bearing turn. Miss it and you are a five-life leader with a hand full of 10-cost Characters you cannot cast and cannot use to defend. Hit it and most of the format cannot get through a board of blockers that rebuild themselves.

EB05 went straight at that catch. The deck finally has a cheap searcher that is also a real counter, and a two-cost that turns the DON!! you were going to refund anyway into removal. Kaido was a fringe pick at the end of OP17. In the second week of EB05 it nearly doubled its share of the room, and a Kaido list went 6-0 to win ChinoizeCup #128.

This guide is about closing the gap that is left: how to hit the turn more often, what to do on the games where you miss, and how to win the ones where you hit.