The 3rd Anniversary Promos Are Repricing Three Days Before OP-17 Lands
Every English 3rd Anniversary Set single is negative on the week and five are on Sell Watch. But the drawdown is concentrated in the A$100 to A$250 band, and the set's A$500 cards barely moved.
The English 3rd Anniversary Set promos have spent the last week going backwards, and the timing is hard to ignore. OP-17 The World''s Strongest Warriors, the 4th-anniversary set, reaches English shelves on 28 August. Three days out, the tier it is succeeding has started to reprice.
All figures below are from the board as of 24 August, converted to AUD at 1.3952 to the US dollar.
The cohort, not one card
We track nine separate products from the English 3rd Anniversary Set. Eight of them are singles, and every one of those eight is down on the week. Five carry a Sell Watch stamp. That is what makes this worth writing up, because one card sliding is noise and a whole print tier sliding together is a demand story.
The sharpest moves sit in the middle of the price range.
Sabo (OP13-120) was A$170 on 17 August. It is now A$113, down 33.7% in seven days, on Sell Watch, with A-tier liquidity and 19 recorded sales over the last 30 days.
Portgas.D.Ace (OP13-119) tracks it almost exactly. A$152 down to A$102, off 32.8%, also Sell Watch, also A liquidity, also 19 sales.
Ace & Sabo & Luffy (OP13-007) is down 20.4% to A$106 on 38 sales. The set''s DON!! card is down 18.1% to A$16.64 and has changed hands 323 times in the last month, which is the deepest sales count in the group and the hardest one to dismiss as a thin quote.
The top of the tier barely moved
Here is the part that complicates the tidy version of this story. The expensive cards in the same set held up.
Monkey.D.Luffy (OP13-001) is down 7.8% to A$555. The other Luffy (OP13-118) is down 2.1% to A$500. Sabo (OP13-004) is down 0.8% to A$286. The sealed bundle is down 4.4% to A$1,434, and all four are still stamped Hold.
So the drawdown is concentrated in the A$100 to A$250 band rather than spread across the tier. That band is where the set-completer buyer and the flipper overlap, and it tends to be the first place discretionary money leaves when attention shifts to a new product.
What last year''s tier did
We have a longer record on the 2nd Anniversary Set DON!! card, and it is the closest thing to a control available. On 27 July it was A$30.76. It is now A$15.16, a 50.7% decline over thirty days, and it was already grinding down before OP-17 pre-release weekend began on 21 August.
The Japanese 3rd Anniversary DON!! shows a milder version of the same shape: down 14.7% on the week and 15.7% over thirty days, to A$9.92 on 369 sales.
The 1st and 2nd Anniversary sealed bundles have not moved at all in a month, but they are C-tier liquidity with almost no recorded sales. Flat there means untested, not stable.
What this shows and what it does not
We only began tracking the English 3rd Anniversary singles on 15 August, so we have ten days of history, not thirty. The seven-day moves are real and they are consistent across the group, but ten days is not enough to call an annual cycle. The 2nd Anniversary DON!! is the only card in the family with a full thirty-day trace, and one card is not a pattern either.
What the data does support is narrower: the mid-priced English 3rd Anniversary promos repriced sharply in the same week OP-17 pre-release stock reached the secondary market, and the expensive cards in the same set did not.
What we''re watching
- Whether the OP13-119 and OP13-120 slide stops once street date passes on 28 August, or continues as box-opening supply arrives.
- Whether the A$500 Luffys follow the mid-tier down with a lag, which would argue tier-wide decay, or hold, which would confirm this is a set-completer story.
- The 2nd Anniversary DON!! at A$15.16, for signs of a floor. If a one-year-old anniversary promo stabilises around here, that gives us a rough shape for where the 3rd Anniversary DON!! settles.
- Treasure Cup Kissimmee on 29 August, the first major event of the OP-17 format, for whether competitive attention pulls further demand away from legacy promo tiers.
We will re-check this cohort in thirty days and publish the numbers whichever way they go.