The DON!! Tier Just Lost Its Exclusivity, and the Sealed Sets Are Winning
OP-17 puts alternate art DON!! cards into booster packs for the first time. Across 56 DON!! items on our board, the sealed sets are climbing while the loose cards from those exact same sets are down as much as 35.6% in a month.
Until this weekend, every alternate art DON!! card in One Piece came through a side door. A tournament pack. An anniversary set. A Double Pack Set bundled with a booster. Never from a pack you could just buy off a shelf.
OP-17 The World's Strongest Warriors changed that. The set landed in Japan on 22 August and reaches English shelves on 28 August, and it puts four alternate art DON!! cards into the pack pool. A category that was promo only is now pullable.
We track 56 DON!! items. Here is what the board looks like on the morning after the Japanese launch.
The tier is soft, not broken
Ten of the 56 carry a Sell Watch stamp. Two carry Accumulate. The other 44 sit on Hold. Thirty of the 56 are down over seven days and 26 are down over thirty, but the median move is close to flat: minus 0.4% on the week and zero on the month.
That is not a collapse. It is a tier where the average is being pulled around by a handful of large moves in both directions, which is what you would expect from a category whose supply rules just changed.
The interesting part is where those moves are landing.
Same card, two formats, opposite results
The Special DON!! Set line gives us a clean test, because we track both the sealed set and the individual card that comes out of it.
Special DON!! Set Vol. 1 -Luffy- sits at A$74.30, up 9.8% over thirty days. The Luffy DON!! card from inside that same set sits at A$14.14, down 35.6% over the same window.
Vol. 2 tells the same story. The sealed Ace set is at A$64.99, up 6.8% on the month. The loose Ace card is at A$6.46, down 15.5% on the week and 30.2% on the month, stamped Sell Watch.
Vol. 3 makes it three for three. Sealed Sabo set at A$54.76, up 6.1% on the month. Loose Sabo card at A$8.24, down 13.9% on the week and 18.5% on the month, also Sell Watch.
The full Vol. 1 to 3 bundle is the strongest item in the whole cohort at A$205.63, up 8.4% on the week and 9.8% on the month, one of only two Accumulate stamps in the tier. That one comes with a caveat: only two copies sold in the last thirty days and we grade its liquidity at C. Thin markets move on very little.
![Special DON!! Set Vol. 1-3 [Set of 3]](https://eqqbnafuxciluxqemrif.supabase.co/storage/v1/object/public/mirror/c5/c5c9ca22e081ed5ec6a20dbac1f3caf295308042.jpg)
Grouped by channel, the pattern holds
Split the 56 by where they came from and the same shape appears.
The eleven sealed Special DON!! Card Packs, the DP-01 through DP-11 line, have a median thirty day move of plus 2.2%, with one Sell Watch and one Accumulate between them. DP-01 out of OP04 is the standout at A$17.70, up 5.4% on the week and 16.9% on the month.
The twenty loose DON!! cards pulled from Double Pack Sets have a median thirty day move of minus 7.0%, with ten of the twenty down across both the week and the month.
So what is holding value here is not the character and not the artwork. It is the format. A sealed, intact product still has a story that a new pack pool cannot rewrite. A loose promo card is now sitting next to something a player can pull for themselves.
It is not a clean sweep
Character still counts inside the loose tier. The Katakuri DON!! from Double Pack Set Vol. 7 is at A$8.33, up 9.7% on the week and 53.1% on the month. The Boa Hancock DON!! from Vol. 4 is at A$15.70, up 13.2% on the month.
The heaviest damage sits in the anniversary sets. The English 3rd Anniversary Set DON!! is down 49.1% in a week at A$15.15. The Japanese version is down 18.9% on the week at A$10.06. The English 2nd Anniversary Set DON!! is down 52.5% over thirty days at A$15.79.
What we're watching
English street date is 28 August, and that is when the pack pool actually opens for most of this audience. Japan has given us six days of price discovery. The English week will tell us whether the sealed premium widens or closes.
Three things on our list. Whether the three Special DON!! Sets keep separating from their own loose contents once English supply lands. Whether the anniversary set DON!! cards find a floor or keep sliding. And where the four new OP-17 pack DON!! cards settle relative to the promo tier they are joining.
All figures are from our board as of 22 August, converted at 1.3959 USD to AUD. We will come back and grade this one in thirty days.