From launch to the top three, fast
The One Piece Card Game launched internationally in mid-2022 and, within 18 months, had become the third-largest trading card game in the world by sales, behind only Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering. The momentum hasn't slowed. TCGPlayer data for the fourth quarter of 2025 shows One Piece overtaking Yu-Gi-Oh! in both October and November by gross merchandise value, prompting the platform's own editorial team to suggest the trading card industry's traditional "Big Three" may need to be redefined to make room for it.
The set-by-set data tells the same story. Of 71 mature One Piece sets currently tracked, 63 of them, 89 percent, rose in value over a recent 90-day period, with the average set gaining approximately 27 percent in three months. For a card game that didn't exist in Western markets before 2022, that is an extraordinary rate of sustained appreciation.
The revenue behind the hype
The growth shows up clearly in Bandai's own financial disclosures. The company's Toys & Hobby Japan segment, where One Piece card revenue is booked, grew 56.2 percent to 94.2 billion yen, roughly 620 million US dollars, in the fiscal year ending March 2025. Across all One Piece products, not just cards, total worldwide IP revenue reached 139.5 billion yen in the same period. One Piece TCG revenue in Japan specifically tripled between the 2022 to 2023 and 2023 to 2024 fiscal years.
Zoomed out further, Bandai's entire trading card segment reached approximately 1.9 billion US dollars, with One Piece accounting for roughly 40 percent of that total, in the order of 760 million US dollars. For a game barely four years old in Western markets, that scale of revenue explains why both counterfeiters and Bandai's own supply strategy are now shaping the collector experience in ways they weren't a year or two ago.
Growth this fast attracts counterfeiters
Rapid appreciation and high per-card values are exactly the conditions counterfeiters look for, and One Piece TCG is now seeing the effects. Fake cards are increasingly high quality, to the point where they are genuinely difficult to distinguish from authentic product without close inspection or grading company verification. The cards most targeted are the expensive alternate-art manga rares that drive headline sales; the Monkey D. Luffy OP05-119 Secret Rare Alternate Art Parallel, one of the most expensive One Piece cards on the secondary market, has traded for upwards of 3,000 US dollars ungraded, making it exactly the kind of card worth a counterfeiter's effort to replicate.
Fakes tend to concentrate on platforms where sellers can operate with limited scrutiny, including eBay, Amazon third-party listings, and private seller groups on social media, and they surface most aggressively in the window immediately after a new set or story arc drops, when demand and buyer urgency both peak. As a cautionary parallel from the grading world, CGC recently recalled approximately 1,500 potentially counterfeit cards that had already made it into circulation before detection, a reminder of how much fake product can move through an ecosystem before it's caught. PSA maintains a brand protection team spanning its stable of grading brands, PSA, Beckett and SGC, sharing intelligence on new counterfeit techniques as they emerge across all the trading card games it grades, One Piece included.
Then Bandai added reprints to the mix
Counterfeiting isn't the only force reshaping value in this market. Bandai has confirmed three sets available for reprint in 2026, including PRB-02: One Piece Card The Best Vol. 2 for English-language territories. The market reaction was immediate: the announcement alone caused Monkey D. Luffy (061) to lose more than 25 US dollars in retail value, and more broadly, reprints of top cards from earlier sets have pushed some prices down by as much as 40 percent.
The logic behind the reprints is straightforward from Bandai's side: persistent shortages have kept prices elevated and made it difficult for new players to enter the game, and reprinting popular sets addresses both problems at once. But for collectors who bought early booster boxes or high-end singles at premium prices during the original shortage, the effect is a direct hit to the value of what they already hold, and it lands without much warning.
The reseller problem Bandai still hasn't solved
The reprint strategy has also reopened an older complaint. Fans and collectors have been vocal that the original print runs for several earlier sets were dominated by resellers and bots rather than genuine retail scarcity, meaning much of the supply never reached the players and collectors it was intended for in the first place. There is now visible pressure on Bandai to abandon first-come-first-served release models in favour of made-to-order or allocated systems for the upcoming reprints, specifically to stop the same scalping dynamic repeating itself.
The underlying criticism carries real weight: if a scarcity narrative that inflated prices was partly manufactured by resale activity rather than pure supply and demand, then correcting it through reprints doesn't just add new supply, it also retroactively exposes how much of the earlier price appreciation may not have reflected sustainable long-term value.
Two risks, one collection
For anyone holding One Piece TCG cards as more than a hobby purchase, whether for eventual resale, insurance purposes, SMSF documentation, or estate planning, authenticity risk and value stability risk are now sitting on top of each other. A card's insured or reported value needs to reflect current market reality rather than a peak hype price that a reprint announcement can erase within days, and its authenticity needs to be independently verified rather than assumed on the strength of a slab or a seller's reputation alone.
This is exactly the combination that a professional valuation methodology is built to address: physical inspection and authentication to confirm what is genuinely in hand, paired with comparable sales analysis grounded in current, not historical, market data. A one-piece card bought at the height of a shortage narrative and never revisited since is a liability waiting to surface, either at claim time, at audit time, or at sale time.
TCG VALUATIONS
Whether you're holding a single Monkey D. Luffy alternate art or a full One Piece TCG collection, growth this fast rarely arrives without volatility. TCG Valuations authenticates and values trading cards, including One Piece, Pokémon and other TCGs, using mandatory physical inspection, verified comparable sales and PI-backed reporting, so you know exactly what you hold and what it's worth today, not what it was worth at the peak of the hype cycle. Book a Market Opinion or a formal valuation to get a current, defensible number on your collection.
Sources:
TCGPlayer editorial, Q4 2025 GMV data on One Piece vs Yu-Gi-Oh!; TCGIndex, "The State of One Piece Card Investing in 2026"; Bandai Namco Holdings, Integrated Report 2025 / IR Newsletter No.80; Sabatcg, "Bandai's Top 3 Most Successful Card Games: Sales and Revenue 2017-2025"; CGC Cards, "Counterfeit Card Alert: Monkey D. Luffy Alternate Art Manga Rare"; Rare Cards Japan, "How to Spot a Fake One Piece Card" (2026 guide); Bonus Action, "Official One Piece TCG Reprint Faces Major Hurdle"; GameRant, "October is Going to Be a Big Month for One Piece Fans"; Kotaku, "One Piece TCG Scalpers Cause Weekly Shonen Jump Shortage"; Sports Collectors Digest, PSA brand protection / fraud report coverage