Anime Trading Cards: Can You Actually Make Money From Opening One Piece Booster Packs?

I am sure you have came across articles like this as you browse the internet. These high quality Charizard cards have been sold for more than $400,000. And in fact, this isn't even the most expensive card ever sold. Yes imagine a Pokemon card being able to fund your BTO - now isn't that an amazing feat?

As such, a light bulb lit over my head during the new year as I hassled and pestered my friend Hengfu into going to a card shop and buying the whole box of booster packs to see if we can make a quick profit.

After a hefty discussion, Hengfu suggested that we head down to this card shop to open some cards. At first I wanted to open Pokemon cards but he said that the chances of us getting good cards were low so why not try out One Piece cards. If you have followed (stalked) me closely on my instagram stories, we actually opened 5 packs each at Kuala Lumpur back in December for fun and Hengfu was the only one that had any good draws.

But back then we opened the series 1 cards and now we were attempting to open series 2 cards instead. So you may be wondering what's the difference? The general gist is that the cards you are getting from each series will be different which means the rare goodies you are getting will be different.

For illustration purposes, Shanks (alternate art) will be the card that you want to get from series 1 and is priced at around 2k back when I was opening the packs.

And for series 2 you have my favourite Ace (Foil, super parallel) at a whopping 1.3k. Pretty amazing right? 

But What Are The Odds?

Before we go about opening the boxes let us also understand the odds of getting these ultra super rare cards so we can sort of guess our expected value gotten from each pack opening. Here's a MVP answer from a reddit user:

Here's a summary of the odds in text format:

A case has 12 booster boxes and is guaranteed to have:

• 4 boxes with a standard Secret Rare (most likely 2 Shanks and 2 Yamato) and no parallel art card (*unless it is manga Shanks), and 3 Super Rares.

• I say standard Secret Rare because (most) parallel Secret Rares will appear in place of a parallel art card in one of the other 8 boxes.

• *Unlike other parallel art cards, manga Shanks seems to appear in place of one of the 2 guaranteed Secret Rare boxes with a Shanks.

• 2 boxes with an alt Leader, a parallel art card (of any rarity except manga SEC Shanks), and 3 Super Rares.

• 6 boxes with a parallel art card (of any rarity except manga SEC Shanks) and 4 Super Rares.

All booster boxes will fall under these 3 categories.

Alright now that we understood the odds, we went ahead to the shop and got 1 box of cards at $50. Yes this meant that we will have 24 packs between both of us and each of us get to open 12 packs leading to a total of 144 cards. So out of this 144 cards I am looking out for Mr Ace.

Let There Be Cards

So two guys seated at a random corner of Dhoby Ghaut interchange started opening the One Piece card packs and let the games begin.

We started taking turns opening the cards and the first pack I opened I got this anime grill from out of nowhere.

I then attempted to sell Hengfu this on the spot for $20 and he rejected my offer. Shame on him not knowing a good deal when he's being offered one. The next few packs that we opened didn't really have any good cards with Hengfu constantly complaining on his poor luck while me spamming “见证奇迹的时刻”

It was amazing how after opening more than half the packs we didn't see any good cards at all. This was when we had a change of luck and the packs I opened started to have some amazing drops.

I first got this totally cool looking Luffy card..

Before getting an even more amazing Ah Gong Whitebeard next

I ended my draw with a more cartoony version of Luffy.

In the meantime, I was harassing Hengfu throughout. Cue my constant LAI LIAO LAI LIAO LAI LAIO....

Before Hengfu realising that he got some garbage cards. But at the end he was able to get two interesting draws of Marco and Aokiji. At first I was mocking him for getting these trash draws until I googled the value...

This lucky dude broke even with just 1 card. And meanwhile here's how much his Aokiji card was worth:

Yup, he gotten $32 worth of cards from just 2 draws. Truly amazing luck right there. I even asked him for 6 numbers so I can buy Toto later.

So Did I Make A Profit?

And to answer that question, I went on carousell to determine a fair value of the rare cards that I gotten.

Luckily a user out there was having a fire sale on his cards and I was able to find out the values of my draws:

The above picture is a rough estimate of the value of the cards that you can draw from OP-2 (kudos to carousell user @blossomcup)

And here's a summary of my draws that were worth anything:

Cool Foil Ah Gong Whitebeard - $6

Burning Luffy - $3

Foil Kozuki Oden - $6

Random Anime Grill - $3

Total - $18

So I made a loss of $7 from opening these card packs while Hengfu made a profit of $7.

To be honest, I expected an even greater loss and being able to get $50 from spending $50 from a card in total value was actually rather decent.

The Verdict

Even though we were able to breakeven, this does not mean that you should go about opening random one piece boxes. There is still effort in selling your cards and also there may be a decay in value if you do not protect your cards properly with card sleeves.

But all in all, it was a fun activity to pass time and being a One Piece fan myself, I will definitely be keeping these Luffy cards until the end of time. And one last video of me annoying Hengfu for the road.

Thanks for reading and stay safe everyone!