Franky finally gets a Leader. Here is what his back catalogue looked like the day before.
Bandai revealed the first Franky Leader in the game's history. We track 15 Franky products, average price $18.67 USD, median 52 cents. Here is the dated starting line, published before the outcome is known.
Bandai revealed Franky OP18-021 over the weekend, a green and purple Leader built around Water 7, the Franky Family and the Straw Hat Crew. It is the first Franky Leader in the game''s history. Seventeen booster sets in, one of the founding Straw Hats has only ever been a character card.
The reveal is interesting to us for a narrow reason. Franky has a deep back catalogue and none of it has ever been built around him. That is a clean setup, and it is exactly the kind of thing everyone has an opinion about and nobody writes down beforehand.
So we are writing it down.
The board on reveal weekend
We track 15 Franky products. On 30 August the average price across them was $18.67 USD (A$26.04) and the median was 52 cents USD (A$0.73). The gap between those two numbers tells the story better than either one alone. Two promos carry almost the entire value of the name, and ten of the 15 trade under a dollar.
The top of the pile:
The promo parallel of ST01-010 at $126.34 USD (A$176.21), down 10.2 percent on the week and down 9.3 percent on the month. Six recorded sales in 30 days, liquidity B. Stamped SELL WATCH.
General Franky P-027 from the CS 2023 Event Pack at $89.51 USD (A$124.85), up 3.8 percent on the week and up 10.4 percent on the month. Four sales in 30 days, liquidity B. Stamped ACCUMULATE.
Below those it thins out fast. The CS 2023 Celebration Pack Franky sits at $29.16 (A$40.67), the Round 1 collab promo at $18.07 (A$25.20), the 2023 Gift Collection copy at $13.13 (A$18.31). Then the floor. The OP17 Franky, OP17-090, is at nine cents and down 83.6 percent on the week, which is not a Franky story at all: all 106 OP17 singles we track are down on the week, median 76.5 percent, the standard unwind once street-date supply lands on pre-release prices.
What the reveal did on day one
Nothing measurable. Four of the top five Franky items printed a flat one-day move on 30 August. The Round 1 promo moved down 9.1 percent, which reads as continued deflation from the Round1 collab bubble rather than a reaction to a Leader that cannot be bought until November.
That is the honest read, and it is what we would expect. Spoiler-season reveals tend to move the cards a Leader will play alongside, and those have not been spoiled yet.
The claim we cannot test
The obvious claim is that a first Leader for an established character is a reliable catalyst for that character''s existing cards. We cannot back-test it. Our price history begins on 13 July 2026, which is 49 days. Every prior first-Leader case sits well outside that window. Anyone quoting a percentage for those older events is quoting something they did not measure, and neither did we.
What we can do is measure this one from a dated starting line, in public. The figures above are that line.
Two things make Franky an unusually clean case. His value is concentrated in promos rather than in playable staples, so if these prices move it is character demand rather than deck demand. And the revealed Leader text points at Stage cards, a card type that has spent most of the game''s life in bulk boxes. If a Leader can make a dormant card type relevant, a price series is where that shows up first.
What we're watching
The two liquid Franky promos are the ones worth following, because they have enough recorded sales to actually reprice. The interesting question is whether General Franky P-027 holds its ACCUMULATE stamp through spoiler season on four sales a month, or whether that stamp turns out to be a thin-market artefact. A stamp on four sales and a stamp on four hundred are different animals, and we would rather say so than let the label do the talking.
Dates on the calendar: OP-18 pre-release week begins 13 November, street date 20 November. Full spoiler season runs through September and October, and the Water 7 support that would make this Leader real should surface in that window.
We will republish these same 15 prices on 20 November and grade the call either way it lands.