It’s been a little while since I’ve written up a box review, I’ve been working a lot on the YouTube channel in the meanwhile. This set, One Piece Endless Treasure – totally blew me away. From the very first pack I knew this one was something special, now having ripped a few boxes with even more on the way, I am certain of that. Let’s take a closer look at this incredible series of cards, with a focus on the release of set 5.
Table of Contents
THE SERIES
One Piece is a long running anime and an even longer running serialized manga – having started way back in 1997 and just never stopped. There are currently over 107 “chapters” to this story, each of those is an entire book. There is even a kind of epic live action version of the story on Netflix! To say this franchise is popular would be an understatement, maybe the only thing possibly more popular would be Dragon Ball.
There are a ton of One Piece trading card sets out there. Licensed stuff like the TCG game, now available officially in english too. There are also many licensed trading card sets produced by Little Dinosaur in China – I’ve even reviewed those over here. There are more bootleg sets produced by every major manufacturer. And then there is this, One Piece Endless Treasure, Kabog Animations love letter to the series.
It’s 5 total sets with a 6th just announced. Each of those sets is massive, with the 5th having an unheard of 529 unique cards to collect. For reference that is more cards that some of the major Topps Baseball sets have. Big Panini sets will top out at 400 unique cards. Set 5 is totally sold out but you can actually still buy boxes of set 4 for decent prices. I’ve never found sets 1-3 for sale, likely they sold out before I even started the Archives project.
THE BOX
This box is gorgeous, you will want to keep and display it as much as the cards that it contains. It’s just like that Doraemon Walk with Me set in that way, they box is a complete work of art. It’s not an off-the-shelf box either like we see with even most premium sets. This thing was custom designed for Kabog, they use it for their Bleach releases as well. It’s a tri-fold box that opens from the top. There are two main front images, both done in black and gold, then 2 side flaps that also have cool artwork done in blue.
I bought my first box for 31$ from Anime Card Store back when you could still buy them, they are sold out now. My next 3 boxes came for 27$ from C1LUXURYACC Store. I also bought my set 4 box from them and you can still buy those and I recommend you do as the cards in set 4 are just as good.
Inside the box you’ll find 14 packs, 2 will hit packs. That’s right, you get 2 promo packs in these! Be careful cause there are 4 pack colors that exist and the 12 regular packs in set 5 will always be blue packs. Sometimes one of your promos will also be in a blue pack, but it will be on top. I usually end up mixing mine up with the regular packs but it has always been there.
Each pack will then have 2 thick, ~50pt cards in it. One thing I absolutely love about this series is the set planning and distribution. These are massive sets, 500+ unique cards available – so how do you distribute that? Do you just throw 100% random assortments into the boxes? You could, but then you’d have like 10 REALLY happy customers and 10,000 super angry ones lol. It’s better to plan the distribution such that each box is a known quantity with a generally known floor/ceiling. And then throw the big cards in at 1/2 a box.
See that screenshot from one of my videos up above? That’s what I mean. That was 1 box and you can see that there is a clear pattern. You’re getting 3 cards from each of the base rarity levels in every box, it’s essentially guaranteed. That’s REALLY nice to see, compared to like Star Wars where certain URs are the most rare cards in the entire set. The rest of your cards will then be hits drawn from the countless other rarity levels. So this doesn’t really make it any easier to complete, it just makes it not feel bad to rip a box.
ONE PIECE ENDLESS TREASURE SET 5
This is a massive set, I’ve said before but we really need to understand this. 529 unique cards is A LOT. This is the first review where it simply won’t be practical for me to walk you through all the rarity levels, the flier has 107 pages of them. I’ll try to cover some of the best parts though, but really just go scroll through that flier sometime, it’s mind blowing.
At the base you’ve got the usual SR/SSR/UR sets. The SSR is kind of crazy though, it features the pirate crew dressed up as basketball players… and hyper realistic ones at that. The HR and GR levels look really cool with these neon and graffiti style cards. There are 2 puzzles here too, which… meh puzzles. LR is kind of like polaroid photo style cards, LGR though are these absolutely wild colorful paint splash cards – they look insane.
Moving up into the top rarities, ZR features these super cool black and white ink paintings. SP are these also super cool collage style cards. From here I’m going by the flier as I haven’t pulled much higher than SP. There are a ton of other rarities that I’ve never seen. Stuff like SDR are these hand painted looking portraits with little frames. MR cards have anime cell relics in them, SQ have coins, SXR are “office lady” cards, waifu basically.
Of course One Piece Endless Treasure also includes redeemable prizes, pretty much all of these do nowadays. You’ll find all kinds of stuff from easy to redeem things like complete rarity sets, uncut sheets, coin and bullet (yes, bullet?) sets. And then also a few things that will prove more difficult to redeem outside of China like computers and larger figure statues.
THE CARDS
The coolest box in the world means nothing if the cards inside can’t keep up – don’t worry, these can, they really really can. Above are two examples of some fairly low rarity cards, GR and HR, both above UR but neither in the “Chase card” levels yet. The art styles are different, but both cards are loaded with printing tech. Stamped boards, multiple layers of printing, that really cool digital cammo style foil treatment. The HR even includes some lenticular coating on the outer boarder to give it a color change effect.
The SSR level was the most surprising rarity, and also one of my favorite. It features the pirate crew dressed as a basketball team, with a kind of realistic looking style to it. These cards are just so different are show the characters in such a unique way that it’s impossible not to love them. Just look at Nami there, she’s cheering for you!
LGR is another favorite level of mine, these cards look incredible. They are printed in glitter, just like those awesome JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure cards are. The way the glitter is used is really neat though, they make it look like there is this explosion of colorful light behind and all around the characters. They are some of the most striking and colorful cards I’ve ever seen, and there is a whole rarity tier of these!
Topping out the normal rarity levels are SP and ZR. I call these “Normal” as they’ve been in all three of the boxes I’ve opened so far. SP is easily the best with that almost seashell collage look to it. The black and white ink drawing style on the ZR cards is also quite nice. Then you move into chase territory, like that onyx black SSP up there. Well over half the rarity tiers are up here. This means they aren’t guaranteed in a box and are more like the special cards you might find in packs or pull from the promo packs.
CONCLUSIONS
From the very first pack I could tell this set was special. The more I’ve learned about it, the better I think it is. It’s one of those rare products that combines quality with design and then turns everything up to 11. Instead of getting 1-200 cards, we get over 500. Instead of 10-12 rarity levels – we get 29! The fact that there are then 5 different sets to collect already with a 6th on the way, well you could easily make One Piece Endless Treasure you one and only set of trading cards and never run out of cool cards to pull.