Table of Contents
Yellow Enel has been a popular Leader since its release. With Katakuri no longer reigning as the best Yellow deck, Enel has taken its place, becoming one of the top decks in the competitive scene. If you've participated in OPTCG tournaments or played on the ranked ladder, you've likely encountered Enel players, and defeating them can be challenging.
While Yellow Enel is a strong deck with control and healing tools that can prolong games, it often capitalizes on the opponent's lack of familiarity with the matchup. The deck’s greatest strength lies in its ability to punish inexperience. If you’re not confident in your understanding of how to approach this matchup, Yellow Enel will exploit your mistakes more than any other deck.
Of course, the deck you’re playing will heavily influence how the matchup against Enel unfolds. However, this guide aims to help you understand Enel’s strategy and how to disrupt it to create more threatening turns.
What does Leader Enel Do?
Before discussing how to counter OP05-098-enel, it's important to understand its Leader effect. During your turn, when OP05-098-enel reaches 0 Life cards, it adds the top card of its deck to its Life cards and trashes one card from hand. This mechanic gives Enel an extra Life card, forcing you to make an additional attack. Although they're trashing a card from hand, they're not actually losing card resources, since that Life card they added replaced the trashed resource.
Every time you drop OP05-098-enel to 0 Life cards, you grant them three advantages: an extra Life card, the chance to trash an unwanted card in exchange for a potentially better one from the top of the deck, and a potential trigger card in their Life area.
To further understand OP05-098-enel's general game plan, let's take a look at the key cards they rely on.
Early Control
OP05-102-gedatsu is the early control OP05-098-enel relies on to slow down your pace. He can KO a Character with a cost equal to the number of cards in your Life Area. So the OP05-098-enel player will usually avoid attacking your Leader and wait for you to develop a Character so they can KO it.
If you're a 4-health Leader, you can skip developing a 4-cost Character and wait for the upcoming turn to play a higher-cost play. This makes their OP05-102-gedatsu removal useless.
If the OP05-098-enel player attack your Leader, this could mean that they don't have a OP05-102-gedatsu in hand, but you might want to take the first hit to make sure they can't KO your upcoming Character development.
OP08-106-nami is a powerful option they rely on to KO a 5-cost Character, but they're forced to trash a card to activate her effect. If they have 3 cards or less, they get to draw a card, which is a huge resource value. Depending on your playstyle, they might be holding onto 5 or more cards in hand which prevents them from drawing a card. OP08-106-nami's Trigger effect KO's a 5-cost or less Character, weakening your attack turn.
OP07-109-monkeydluffy is another removal card they rely on, but only works on 4-cost Characters and they have to be at 2 Life cards for it to activate. OP07-109-monkeydluffy can also be used for his Trigger effect, KOing a 4-cost character and weakening your attack turn.
Win Conditions
OP05-098-enel players heavily rely on these cards to win the game.
- They're high-power Characters that can be difficult to remove.
- Provide an additional Life card.
- Provide extra protection for the Leader, forcing more attacks from you.
- If the Enel player is at 0 Life cards, those three characters can turn back his effect online for the upcoming defensive turn.
OP04-112-yamato and OP07-119-portgasdace can affect the board state the turn they're played, but that depends on the number of Life cards the Enel player has. If they're at 2 Life cards, then they're more limited with those two big plays and will have to compensate if they want to play them.
Triggers
There are plenty of defensive Triggers in Yellow Enel aimed at slowing down your attacks and ensuring they survive the turn.
These Trigger cards can disrupt your attacking turns. Keep in mind that your opponent may have these Triggers on top of their Life cards and try to play around them if possible. For example, if you have no Characters on the field and want to attack with your Leader, make sure to attack with the Leader first before playing a Character, so it doesn’t get KO’d by cards like OP06-101-o-nami.
I’ll cover more about how Triggers can affect your game plan in the Strategy section.
The Strategy
Now that we’ve covered how Yellow Enel operates, let’s discuss how to approach the matchup. Each deck has a different game plan, but I’ll focus on the general approach you should take against Enel and delve into specific scenarios.
Build a Wide Field
Against Enel, you want to build a board with multiple Characters, presenting a threat that can unleash at the right moment. Instead of attacking their Leader with your Characters and activating their Leader effect prematurely, hold off on your attacks until you have enough attackers to pose a lethal threat.
Your opponent can always attack with their Leader, which means they'll be more than happy to attack a rested Character and weaken your field. By keeping your Characters active, you prevent Enel from attacking and weakening your field. This forces Enel to attack your Leader or not attack at all.
Leave them at two health
Enel players want to fall to 1 Life card and remain there, unlocking their cards' effects. OP04-112-yamato, OP07-119-portgasdace, and EB01-059-kingdom-come are used to their full potential when Enel is at 0 or 1 Life cards. (Playing EB01-059-kingdom-come at 0 Life cards is usually not the right move).
So, what’s the strategy when leaving them at two Life cards and focusing on board development?
- OP04-112-yamato will not give an extra Life card, cutting down on their extra card resource.
- If they're at two Life cards, the opponent must choose between gaining an extra Life card or granting Rush to OP07-119-portgasdace; they can't have both.
- EB01-059-kingdom-come will Trash Life cards until they're down to 1. So they'll lose resources you keep them above 1 Life card.
So now these powerful high-cost plays have drawbacks that opponent needs to worry about.
Remove their Board
Since we know the Enel player would love for us to attack their Leader and drop them to 1 Life card, we're usually not forcing many Counter cards from their hand. So instead, we can shift our focus on their rested Characters.
A rested Character is valuable for the Enel player as it helps them control the field and even put aggression on your Leader. I like to think of it this way, when we're attacking a rested Character, we're also attacking their hand. A rested OP05-102-gedatsu or OP08-106-nami forces players to expend their Counter resources to protect them, weakening their overall Counter power in the late game.
This approach drains their hand of Counter resources without forcing an all-out attack on their Leader.
The Beatdown
Once we've lined up multiple attackers, it's time to strike! We have two goals here when going for the attack, win the game or force them to use Counter resources.
Since Enel can gain a Life card, we always need an additional attack to win the game. If they're at 2 Life cards, we'll need 4 attacks to go through. We should attack with our lower Power attacks first, and test the waters. We want our early hits to go through and have high-power attackers ready to force Counter resources.
The plan here is to force Enel to activate his effect and then try to win the game. At their last Life card, this is where the Enel player will be most defensive, trying to shut you down from putting them at 0 and having your last attacker win the game. We can force Counter resources from them, and even if we don't win the game, having them at 0 Life cards with many of their Counters played, can put them at risk of losing the game on your upcoming turn.
At 0 Life cards, the Enel player is forced to play OP04-112-yamato or OP07-119-portgasdace to gain a Life card so their Enel effect is back online. At that point, OP04-112-yamato won't offer any field control with her KO effect and will only be useful for the +1 Life Card. On the other hand, OP07-119-portgasdace can go for a Rush attack, targeting one of your rested Characters. This turn is important because we need to protect our rested Characters. Countering a OP07-119-portgasdace might be too difficult if they attack a low Power Character, but we should be able to Counter the Leader Enel attack, making sure they only remove one of our Characters.
So now we have another powerful turn with multiple attackers, the opponent is at 1 Life card + Enel effect, and much less counter resources.
Changing the Plan
Trigger cards can force us to deviate from an all-out attack. They could shut down one of our attackers, stopping us from dropping them to 0 Lifecards. Realizing that we don't have enough attacks to trigger Enel's effect, and take out the last Life card, means holding off our attacks and waiting for the upcoming attack turn could be the better decision. This prevents them from activating Enel's effect and filtering their hand for a potentially better card and you'll have less rested Characters on the field. It also means we'll be activating less Counter cards.
However, if we're still capable of having them at 0 Life cards, we should still go for it, as it'll force them to play one of their high-cost Characters on the upcoming turn to gain a Life card.
One of their strongest trigger cards, OP06-115-youre-the-one-who-should-disappear, can be a nightmare if it's the last card in their Life card. Let's say we trigger it, now the Enel player is activating Leader effect + OP06-115-youre-the-one-who-should-disappear to gain two Life cards.
Here things change drastically, instead of continuing with our attack, we should shift to develop more Characters and leave them at two Life cards. This prevents the opponent from gaining more value from their high-cost Characters and enables us to set up for a strong upcoming attack turn.
Three Different Methods to Win
Aggro them Down
This is the least popular approach since few decks in the current meta are capable of an aggressive plan. The goal here is to attack Enel's Leader at every opportunity, aiming to reduce them to 0 Life cards before reaching Don 9. This puts them in a vulnerable position where a single powerful attack could clinch the game.
In response, they'll likely use their resources to defend that last Life card, draining their hand of Counter cards and making it harder for them to survive subsequent attacks.
Maintaining a wide field of Characters keeps up the pressure. Even if they play a high-cost Character like Yamato or Ace, they'll struggle to defend against your next attack since you've already forced them to use many of their Counters. This strategy works best with aggressive decks like Red OP01-001-roronoa-zoro or Red Green OP01-002-trafalgar-law.
Build the Wide Field
This is the most common game plan that most decks will use against Enel. The strategy is to build up a field with multiple attackers, leave Enel at 2 Life cards, and then unleash a massive turn that can either win the game or force out their Counter resources.
Typically, you'll rely on your Leader to apply pressure while keeping your Characters active. This approach prevents Enel from attacking and KOing your Characters, forcing them to rely on removal effects to weaken your field instead.
This strategy is effective for most decks that focus on field presence. Decks like Green OP07-019-jewelry-bonney or Blue OP01-060-donquixote-doflamingo can go for the wide-field game plan.
Starve Them
The "starve" strategy is effective only with late-game decks that can maintain resources throughout the match. The key here is to avoid attacking the opponent's Leader, preventing them from gaining additional resources or, at the very least, keeping them at two Life cards for most of the game.
The goal here is to deplete their resources, not just Counters, but also threats. We want to remove their high-cost Characters through removal effects or attacking and KOing them. If they're not gaining a Life card through Yamato or Ace, this cuts on their resource generation and puts them in an awkward spot.
Enel's deck also lacks reliable tools to deal with 9-cost Characters, except for EB01-059-kingdom-come, which might force them to trash Life cards. While OP03-123-charlotte-katakuri can remove 8-cost Characters, doing so gives you an additional Life card.
Eventually, you'll win the field and will switch to attacking their Leader, putting them at risk of losing the game. This game plan only works with slow decks like Green OP07-019-jewelry-bonney or Black OP07-079-rob-lucci.
Tech Cards
Anything that cuts resources from the opponent's hand is extremely useful against Enel, helping you take things to the late game and potentially trashing valuable high-cost Characters.
Closing Words
Understanding how the Yellow Enel deck operates and what they're capable of makes it easier for you to win games. Eliminating the mistakes they usually strive to take advantage of, weakens their deck and makes it to set up the lethal turn.
