One Piece: Spectacular Anime Pirate Trading Cards

I know I was just showing off some really cool looking boxed sets in the last mail call post, but we can’t only open things like that, we need to get through these 1-yuan boxes too. Today I dug out one of the very first boxes I bought, this arrived in the same shipment as those Dragon Ball Z 1-yuan cards I looked at earlier. I know almost nothing about One Piece, as usual, but I’m more than open to looking at some Anime Pirate Trading Cards!

I have two one piece 1-yuan boxes, I’m not really sure how that happened as I only remember ordering one of each brand if I didn’t really know much about it yet. One is a Little Dinosaur box, so the same manufacturer as the Demon Slayer cards I liked. This one is a new company though, Kaoong, I wasn’t able to OCR the exact characters sorry. The bottom of the box says “Our first original card set”, so this might be some bootleg product or the IP owner branching out a bit from the big name manufacturers.

This is a 1-yuan box, so the cheapest of them all. I can’t find any advertising materials for this specific box – again I don’t remember ordering this one, I think I vendor mis-shipped it or replaced something else without asking. Going from the box it does look very similar to the low end anime sets like that Demon Slayer and the Dragon Ball Z. It even has one of those redemption schemes, which means I bet each pack is going to have a card explaining that on the back.

The box is cheap feeling, like most of the 1-yuan boxes I’ve received. These only cost around 15$ or less so we shouldn’t be expecting much. The printing is good, but there is no foil treatment or etching or anything like that on this box. Most of the box is advertising the set, and the prizes from the redemption scheme. The bottom of the box has an interesting log print on it that I thought looked cool. I purchased this from Child’s Taste Store on AliExpress for $14.15.

I know a little about One Piece, but not much. I’ve played some video games from the universe or featuring characters taken from that universe. I suspect I’d like the show, it’s got pirates after all, but it does seem a bit fan service-y in that way that anime shows can be if you know what I mean. Still the art on these sets always looks cool, and from the number of them that exist I can tell that One Piece is pretty popular.

There are 36 packs in this box, typical for 1-yuan products, each pack has 5 cards although 1 will be the redemption card so only printed art on the front. I’m not sure what to call these cards, they are printed on the front just like any other card so it’ll be an R or an SR or whatever. But the back is not the standard back, it’s advertising on the prize scheme that goes along with the set. I haven’t opened enough to know but I suspect that the same card also exists with the standard back, meaning you really want that one for a “complete” set?

I won’t do a separate pack post on these as they are nowhere near as impressive as those wonderful Kayou cards were. These cards are cheap cardboard, they come out of the pack and curve immediately, there is no coating on them or anything like that. These are very similar in quality to the Little Dinosaur cards, but far away from any of the Gundam or Star Wars cards. Let’s take a look at a few and then I’ll add the rest to the database.

First up is this bear, why? Cause I thought they looked cool :). All 5 cards were R with one slight exception, that’s the worst distribution so far but it’s also only one pack. I’ve started to keep track of the rarities I get in each pack over here so we can really compare the various brands and sets. This bear is Bepo, the navigator of the Heart Pirates, sounds cute too. Being just R level cards, these are really basic with just color printing, no foil or any other special treatment on these. There is some light stats on the front, perhaps some type of game system, but it looks really basic if so.

The framing art is great on these, really helps to make each card feel like part of a set. That’s hard to understand until you see it done badly as in the Game Soul cards. I love the map artwork, and even the slight glow around the font is very nice to read on the back.

Next up we have Emporio Ivankov, a very Tim Curry looking pirate. This was the 5th card in my pack, so it’s back has the redemption stuff printed on it. I don’t really understand these systems, I think you must collect enough cards with the right symbols on them, that’s that big gold character in the blue circle. If you get the 7 shown on the bottom then you could redeem that for some sort of tablet. The thing is, unless you have a friend in China or are yourself in China, this is next to impossible to actually do. The vendor would have to do it, it would take months and they would charge you more than the prize is worth. So for us collectors in the west, this is one aspect of the hobby that is generally closed to us.

The last card we’ll look at today is Kurozumi Tama, this is something new to me too. This is an R+ card, so not quite an SR, but better than an R? The card has some nice glitter coating over certain parts giving it a cool look but leaving plenty of room for far shinier cards to come. So far not too impressed by these, but they are only 1-yuan and this is just the first pack. To the archives they go.