I have a difficult relationship with One Piece. On the one hand it seems right up my alley, it’s anime, it’s pirates, lots of pirates. On the other hand, I’ve never actually sat down and watched it lol. I do have two 1-yuan boxes, the HZ1 I reviewed and I actually realized I also have HZ2 – I can’t remember how I got that, but that is kind of how the Archives are designed to work. I decided to add a more expensive 10-yuan product to my catalog, so today we’re going to look at The Grand Line, a trading cards boxed set.
Table of Contents
The Box
This is a textbook “Star Wars” box. It’s got the magnetic lid, the inner artwork, the plastic tray – 10 + 1 packs. I’d be shocked if this wasn’t made by exactly the same company – although it is labeled in a totally different way. Another possibility is that many designers are subcontracting the printing and packaging to the same company. That would also get us some many different products with identical box designs.
That doesn’t mean it’s bad, quite the opposite, The Grand Line box design is fantastic. It’s so strong it survives shipping perfectly every time. It feels premium, and the artwork on these is always great and this one is no different. This One Piece product is darker though, it’s dark green with foil so it is difficult to photograph or can – check out the video to really see what it looks like.
I bought this from my favorite vendor, C1LUXURYACC Store for $29.58 – that was probably a bit high but I’m noticing that pricing is really fluid over there. Like one day this box will be 30$ a week later 25$, so you kind of have to play it like the stock market to get the best deals, or just fail every time and buy at peak like I do lol.
The The Grand Line Set
Isn’t it nice that we can breeze through the box sections now that we’ve seen so many? Let’s go through the fliers, and OMG there are a lot of fliers for this product. There are actually more pages to this flier than that super long Doraemon one. It is a bit fluffed out though, with only one section per page and lot of empty space. I’ll put the entire flier into the archives – but this is probably much easier to read directly on AliExpress.
I’ll try to break it down here, but it is an intense list of cards. There are a bunch of prizes in this, I assume you pull medallion type cards to redeem them. There are 9 gold cards, but they are also redemption items it looks like – unlike that bonkers JoJo box where you can just pull solid cold cards from the freaking box!
There are 8 “Goddess Gem Cards”, I assume just gem colored although these are top rarity cards so who knows. There is a whole set of gold and silver coin “book” cards, which are thick cards that open like a book and the coin is embedded in it. That is followed by 9 map book cards, 6 “framed” cards, 9 enamel medallion cards. Then 9 “Luxurious” character cards. All these and the ones before seem to limited, I’m not sure if that means serial numbered – but most likely that is what it means.
This just keeps on going with 7 “uniform” cards, then 12 up close portrait cards – these look pretty cool. Then we start to drop into standard rarities with SSP at 18 cards, ZR at 11, SP at 9 and QR with 6 chibi style cards. 9 HR and 8 OR. Rounding out the set we’ve got 21 UR, 36 SSR which is the base of this set. There are also some MR and AR cards that seem to be box promos – at least I got one of the MRs as my promo.
The Cards
We’re looking at Star Wars style cards here too. They are nice thick stock, square corners, rarity level card back art work – and some exceptional printing tech on display. When you open cards like this right after opening cards like that disappointing Doraemon set, the difference is stark indeed. While those are low dpi, un coated cards – these are decadent multilayered creations with gorgeous custom foil backgrounds. Beautifully printed foreground character art – and this highly detailed world map style framing.
I won’t show all the cards, since I only opened 1 pack and got three total cards so far. I do want to show the promo I received in the “hit” pack included in this box. It is an MR featuring Portgas D Ace, which seems like a weird name – but maby a normal name in the One Piece universe? This card is incredible, as somebody with a passion for graphic design – this is an extremely well designed piece. The layering of line artwork with manga panels, character art and multiple type faces is gorgeous. I especially love the foil inlay on this, those shoes are foiled!
Conclusions
Well that was impressive! One Piece is one of those franchises that has tons and tons of products available. Most vendors will have a dedicated section just for One Piece The Grand Line cards. There are tons of base sets, I have 2, and then even more special editions and boxed sets. I don’t know if the one I bought here is the best or not, but it seems really good. Good enough that I’d be willing to pick up a few more if anyone has recommendations.