Deck Guide: Red Yellow Sabo - The Revolutionary Flame

The last One Piece sealed product, Ultra Deck - The Three Brothers, brought us three new leaders. Last time, we discussed Portgas.D.Ace ST13-002, the leader that best uses the cards in the sealed deck itself. He was the simpler option for anyone who wants to play this deck in competitive settings without changing it too much.

As a leader, Portgas.D.Ace ST13-002 is quite "limited". He has clear rules and restrictions that make him balanced. Its deck, therefore, despite good, doesn't change much from player to player and tournament to tournament, as he needs certain cards to work.

Now, Sabo ST13-001 is much more generic as a leader, and can fit many builds. In today's article, let's see a bit more about this leader and the paths you can take him down on!

Sabo ST13-001 is a red and yellow leader with four health, 5000 power, and the "Dressrossa" and "Revolutionary Army" types. However, saying that Sabo only has four health is, in a way, misleading. That's because Sabo ST13-001 is, alongside Enel OP05-098, the leader who heals the most in the entire game.

To activate his ability, we need to attach at least one DON!! to Sabo ST13-001 and move a character that costs three or more and has 7000 power or more from our board to your life pile, face-up. If we do, we may give one of our characters +2000 power until the beginning of your next turn.

At first, this ability is a bit odd. In a way, we'll be attaching a DON!! to our leader and using it to play a character that will go to our life pile, then return to our hand - and then we'll have to use more DON!! to put it in play again. It is totally understandable to see this deck as just a big waste of DON!!, but, as we'll see next, we can recycle many characters on our life pile to our board, and also put more units on the board without using DON!! inefficiently.

Additionally, another great thing about Sabo ST13-001 is that he doesn't limit the types of cards we can put on our life pile. As long as they have the power and cost stated in his text, we can use any character. This means we can create several builds for him, be it with Whitebeard Pirates, Revolutionary Army, or just great yellow or red cards.

So, I decided to show you mainly a Revolutionary Army list because of the synergy with Sabo ST13-001

This is our list:

Red Yellow Sabo List

As we said before, most of this deck focuses on the synergy with the Revolutionary Army. That's because many of these cards, like Karasu OP05-005, for instance, which activates its effect when it has 7000 power, fit the description of cards we can target with Sabo ST13-001's ability.

Besides them, we'll use other cards with many cute effects when we draw them from our life pile (particularly the ones with interesting triggers), and also characters that interact with how many life points we have to use their abilities.

Let's delve a bit deeper into this list:

The Revolutionaries

Because of Belo Betty OP05-002's deck in the Awakening of the New Era set, we have many members of the Revolutionary Army to use in this deck. Let's start with the character version of Belo Betty herself!

Belo Betty OP05-015 is a searcher, so she gets us characters of a certain type or attribute from our deck. In her case, she lets us look at the top five cards in our deck and get a member of the Revolutionary Army.

Another interesting card in this group is Koala OP05-006, which is very similar to Otama OP01-006: she lowers the power of the cards on your opponent's board, and on top of it all gets us a nice +2000 Counter so we can defend ourselves from attacks. By the way, Otama OP01-006 herself is in this deck, and will let us defend ourselves more easily.

Then we have characters from the Revolutionary Army that need 7000 power or more to activate their abilities. The first is the aforementioned Karasu OP05-005, and I can say for sure he is one of the best cards for this strategy. In a deck that wants to play some of our characters into our life pile and then use them, Karasu OP05-005's ability when he enters the battlefield is phenomenal. It is perfect to weaken one of our opponent's tapped characters, or even their own leader.

We can also reuse this ability any time we attack with him, as long as he has 7000 power, and, of course, it stacks if we have multiple Karasu OP05-005.

Inazuma OP06-002 gets Banish when he gets 7000 power, which is a perfect ability to deal with yellow decks that depend a lot on triggers, like Charlotte Katakuri OP03-099.

As for its counterpart from the OP05 set, Inazuma OP05-003, he gets Rush as long as one of our characters has 7000 power or more. It is interesting to note that the way this ability works is not how Portgas.D.Ace ST13-011 works. Ace checks how many life points we have when we play him, that's why his text is in blue. After Portgas.D.Ace ST13-011 gains Rush, it doesn't matter if our life total changes: he won't lose this ability.

Inazuma OP05-003, however, gains Rush through a static ability that will constantly check the board state. This means this character may, yes, lose Rush if our life total changes.

As we have two Inazuma, we'll also have two different Ivankov, but they have similar effects. Emporio.Ivankov OP06-003 lets us play for free a Revolutionary of up to 5000 or less power we find on the top three cards of our deck. Meanwhile, Emporio.Ivankov OP05-004 does something similar: he lets us play a Revolutionary Army character from our hand with 5000 or less power, as long as they aren't Emporio.Ivankov.

Finally, we have Lindbergh OP05-017, which, when he has at least 7000 power, and we attack with him, knocks out small enemy characters with 3000 or less power. This means he's perfect with Otama OP01-006 and Koala OP05-006.

Lindbergh OP05-017 also has a trigger that lets us play him from our life pile if we discard a card from our hand.

And speaking of characters that go from our life pile to our board…

Manipulating Our Life Pile

Besides Lindbergh OP05-017, we have two other cards we can play from our life pile when our opponent has three or less cards in their own life pile: the first one is Nekomamushi OP06-110, which can attack our opponent's tapped characters when he has two DON!!. He'll also have 7000 power after we use this effect, so it's perfect with Sabo.

Then we have Kikunojo OP06-104, which is possibly the best card in this deck. Not only is it extremely easy to give her the power we need to put her on our life pile, we can also play it from there multiple times because of her trigger. And, if, for some reason, our opponent knocks her out while they have three or less cards in their own life pile, Kikunojo OP06-104 will heal us by moving one card from the top of our deck to our life pile.

Kouzuki Hiyori OP06-106 also manipulates the cards in our life pile, as it adds one card from the top or bottom of our life pile to our hand and puts another card, from our hand, on the top of our life pile, face-down. This ability is extremely interesting to make our life pile less predictable and guarantee a better sequence of triggers. Additionally, Kouzuki Hiyori OP06-106 is also a +2000 Counter, so we'll defend ourselves better with it.

Finally, we use two copies of Portgas.D.Ace ST13-011, one of my favorite cards right now, precisely because he gains Rush when we have less life. Portgas.D.Ace ST13-011 is a great tool to end matches all of a sudden, and is perfect to play on tougher turns, right when our opponent thinks they'll be able to defend all our attacks. He is a great card that can both take advantage of how unprepared our opponents are and force them to "overprepare" - they'll have to consider him for any strategy, and we might not even have him in our hand.

Other Cards

Nefeltari Vivi OP04-118 gives Rush to all other red characters that cost 3 or more than her, so most of our deck. We also have three Capone"Gang"Bege OP04-100, which we can put on our life pile from our board to use his powerful trigger, and prevent opponents from attacking us. Finally, we have Shuraiya OP06-009, a powerful blocker.

Options

In a game that already has a good number of cards, like OPTCG, it is always possible to change a list to fit your tastes or collection. Kid & Killer EB01-003 is really similar to Portgas.D.Ace ST13-011, as he can become a 7000 power Rush character under the right circumstances. Unfortunately, he doesn't have a Counter and is much better in aggressive matches.

Kouzuki Momonosuke OP06-107 is another option to manipulate our life pile, just like You’re the One who Should Disappear OP06-115. Meanwhile, Two-Hundred Million Volts Amaru OP05-115 is another great option that interacts with the life pile and significantly grows our characters for less DON!! than usual.

Out of all meta decks, the best matchup possible for Sabo ST13-001 is Gecko Moria OP06-086 because of how well he holds off the game. He also uses powerful attacks and can go around the removals Gecko Moria OP06-086 uses.

Otherwise, Sabo ST13-001 is more "fun" than "powerful". It is a cool deck that makes a good impression, but it still needs some stability.

Did you like this deck? Tell us your thoughts in our comment section below!

Thank you for reading, and see you next time!