Naruto Card Game: How Many Starter Decks at Launch?

Nineteen cards. That’s what Bandai put on the table on July 29, and every single one of them wears a SAMPLE watermark straight across the art, with the usual small print that anything can still change before release.

Here’s what nobody got to see: a product. Not one. No starter deck, no display box, no set number, no hint at how big the first set is going to be. Rules, some card designs, an event roadmap that stretches out to Summer 2027. That’s it. That’s the reveal.

Which of course means the community did what the community always does. Over on r/NarutoCardGame somebody has spent the past few days reverse-engineering the launch lineup in public, and I’ll say this much: that math holds up a lot better than most of the hype threads I’ve scrolled through lately.

Two Leaders Confirmed, the Third One Gets Wished Into Existence

Confirmed Leaders: two. Naruto Uzumaki as N-001 (3 power, 15 life) and Sasuke Uchiha as N-002. Around them, ten character cards, one EX character (Gamabunta), one Chakra card, one Summon card. Add it up and that’s the whole official haul.

The Reddit thread sees a pattern in there:

„Well guaranteed are 3. I assume 4 might be the actual number. However, comparing it to OPTCG up to 6 starters are possible as well.“

The logic goes: red is Naruto, built on a Team 10 core, Gamabunta as the EX, Jiraiya in support. Blue is Sasuke, built on a Taka core, Manda as the EX, Orochimaru in support. Same skeleton both times. Leader, mentor, summon, team. And because one of the 19 cards showed up green, the thread concludes that green is Sakura, with Tsunade mentoring and Katsuyu as her summon.

It’s a tidy argument, I’ll give it that. Ino Yamanaka and Shikamaru Nara genuinely are among the revealed cards, so the Team 10 read isn’t invented. But Bandai never said a word about that green card belonging to a Sakura Leader. The gap between „a green card exists“ and „a green Leader named Sakura exists“ is filled with pure, uncut wishful thinking.

Four. It’s Going to Be Four.

Okay, this is the part where I can offer something better than tea leaves, because I’ve been watching Bandai launches up close for a few years now. They have a house pattern. It is boringly consistent.

The One Piece Card Game launched in English on December 2, 2022 with four starters dropping at once (ST-01 through ST-04) next to the first booster set, OP-01. Dragon Ball Super Card Game Fusion World arrived with boosters and, surprise, four starters. Union Arena does the same thing per license.

Four isn’t a coincidence at Bandai. Four is shelf policy. Four starters fill a retail row, cover four colors, and hand a newcomer a real decision instead of a shrug. Six at launch would break with everything the company has done for four years straight. Three would be embarrassingly thin for a franchise this size.

So my read: four starters at global launch, each with its own Leader, its own summon and a mentor package around it. And I would put actual money on Kakashi fronting one of them. Itachi already exists as a character card with an Akatsuki affiliation, sure, but nothing about that blocks a Leader version showing up in a later product.

What This Means Over Here

Starters matter more for the European market than people tend to admit. They’re the one Bandai product that reliably sits on a shelf at MSRP, for the simple reason that scalpers find them boring. A One Piece ST deck runs you somewhere between 12 and 16 euros depending on the store, and that number has barely moved in years. Displays are where the pain lives. Not the starters.

Assuming Bandai holds the pattern, the Summer 2027 NCG launch looks like this: for roughly 50 to 60 euros you walk away with four playable decks and can start jamming games at the kitchen table without touching a single booster. For a brand-new TCG, that entry price decides basically everything. (Whether those four decks are anywhere near balanced against each other is a completely separate conversation. With One Piece they weren’t, for a long, long time.)

Nothing solid lands before December, though. Bandai has „further information“ penciled in on the roadmap for December 2026, and in my experience that’s when product names and prices actually show up. Before that, Spiel Essen in October is your first shot at getting hands on the thing, and New York Comic Con in early October brings the next round of reveals.

So what’s your call? Four starters, or do you actually trust Bandai to swing for six? And which Leader is missing hardest from the current predictions? Mine’s Kakashi.

Sources

BANDAI: NARUTO CARD GAME Shows Its Hand (press release, July 29, 2026)
NARUTO CARD GAME Official Website: About NARUTO CARD GAME
r/NarutoCardGame: Starter deck prediction
Metamorph Center: All 19 revealed cards at a glance
ONE PIECE CARD GAME: Starter Decks ST-01 to ST-04

Kenearos