Purple Kaido: OP17 Deck Guide

1. Introduction

Purple Kaido is the only deck in OP17 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 removal 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 is 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.

That gap is the whole deck. This guide is about closing it: 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.