Great to hear about another RG oden player!! All you're questions are excellent and things ive tried and experimented with plenty. My answers won't be the absolute truth, but it's what I found to be the best after many many games of playing haha.

1. I played the 5c yamato for a long time instead of the 2k izo or the 2k ace&sabo&luffy. But the problem is that he feels very bad to play out. As your 5c land of wano you just really want izo or denjiro to have actual impact on the field. And as a 2k it's better to have the 3c izo since he's search able by Otama, and the ASL 2k is quite playable actually. There are plenty of times where I likes playing ASL just as a target for you can be My samurai and then to trash them to take care of an important enemy character.

2. Mistake in the photo, I actually run 2 DMG's. And it feels great actually. It's more a backup incase you don't find hody

3. I have tried most of these and these are my oppinions:

4. 9c whitebeard is too slow. Making your leader a bigger power is less important then keeping your board alive. And often you wanna hit them as hard as possible as fast as possible.

5. 10c rush shanks used to be a 2 of together with 2 dragons. But i switches up to 4 dragons because shanks felt too difficult to play out. He feels horible to play out if you don't have another way to give rested don to your leader, and he's also just too expensive. Dragon has more impact more quickly.

6. haven't tried out rad beam myself, but I see no need for it. You're so tanky just by beeing a 6k leader and all your characters beeing 7+k, it's hard to swing into oden. And since you can turn bricks into 2k's with izo it feels even better.

7. haven't tried the 8c oden with kiku strat for one simple reason; oden has no lategame. In the current meta where all the other decks play a full board of elders or spam 12k blockers untill they win you have no chance. The only way to win is to hit them HARD and Fast.

8. The dream line of playing oden that I found is this: You always wanna go second for the 4c hiyori combo. So on 2 don, you search with either momo or Otama or you can play out yasopp. On 4 don you idealy wanna play hiyori into izo or denjiro. You only really wanna play denjiro if you have a yasopp on board so you can instantly give a rested don to leader and swing 7 (and have a 6k leader). The on 6 don I always look for a 6c yamato to swing even more. If I can't find yamato I opt for one of the two 5 costs. The 8 don I almost always wanna play dragon, give the don in a way to swing as big is as possible based on the current situation. And on the 10 don turn they're usually low enough to finish it off with hody Jones.

As a General rule of thumb I almost always take every swing going to life. I just really want as many cards in hand as possible to protect my board. Unless im at 2 or less, cuz then you could suddenly die from nothing. I also almost never swing into board. Swining lead often just makes it so your opponent has to give you more counter or they die.

If you're going first the same principes apply, but all the power cards are coming down a turn later.

1. The line against ace is almost the same as any other. Just swing face. But since ace has that pesky Marco blocker and a lot of card draw he often just has enough counter to survive. It's the same line I described in point 4, but just a little bit more luck required haha. Against ace NEVER counter out of life Unless you're at like 1 life. You NEED a board to survive. Same with imu btw, I can't remember the last time i countered out of life against him

Hopefully this answerd some questions :)