Six New Starters, Two Different Markets: What ST-31 Through ST-36 Show Four Days After Launch
The July 31 wave of six starter decks is splitting hard. Single decks are down as much as 41% since launch while the sealed displays they came out of are flat or climbing. Here is what that divergence is telling us.
Bandai released six new starter decks on July 31: ST-31 Luffy (Red), ST-32 Zoro (Green), ST-33 Kuzan (Blue), ST-34 Katakuri (Purple), ST-35 Sabo (Red/Black), and ST-36 Kid (Yellow). Four days later, the ledger is showing something more interesting than "prices went down." It is showing two different markets moving in opposite directions inside the same product line.
Start with the individual decks. ST-35 Sabo has fallen from a pre-order price near $45 (about A$64) to $25.41 (A$36.27) today, down 40.8% over the past week and now flagged SELL_WATCH.
ST-33 Kuzan tells the same story: $26.54 (A$37.88), down 40.4% on the week, same SELL_WATCH flag.
ST-36 Kid is at $26.27 (A$37.49), down 32.2%.
The other three are softer but still sliding. ST-32 Zoro is down 20.4% to $39.05 (A$55.73), ST-31 Luffy is down 16.7% to $41.26 (A$58.89), and ST-34 Katakuri is down 13.8% to $33.12 (A$47.27).
All six carry SELL_WATCH on our board right now, and all six are trading well under where they opened during pre-order. That part is not surprising. Six starters landing on the same day floods sellers with the same product, and single decks are a thin, liquidity-C market where a handful of listings can move the price fast, which is exactly what our liquidity tier flag is built to catch.
The part worth sitting with is what is happening to the sealed displays, the boxed multi-deck cases these singles come out of. ST-31's display is up 37.8% this week to $176.33 (A$251.66). ST-32's display is up 17.5%.
The Kuzan, Katakuri, Sabo, and Kid displays are essentially flat, down single digits at most, nothing close to the individual deck crash. Whatever is pushing single-deck prices down this hard is not touching the box market the same way. That is a real divergence, not noise, and it is the kind of split that shows up when single units get discounted faster than the sealed product they came out of, whether that is retailers clearing shelf space or resellers breaking cases and racing each other to sell.
We pulled up the last time Bandai did this. ST-23 through ST-28, the previous six-color starter wave, launched together in June 2025. More than a year later, those single decks are trading flat to up, several sitting on ACCUMULATE, priced at or above where they started. That is not a promise this batch follows the same path. Different characters, different meta relevance, different timing relative to OP17 later this month. But it is a useful reminder that day-four prices on a starter wave are closer to noise than signal, and the decks that look cheapest right now are also the ones the data says to watch rather than chase.
What we're watching: whether the ST-35 and ST-33 single decks stabilize once the initial post-launch selling clears, and whether the gap between single-deck and display pricing widens or closes as OP17 approaches on August 28 and collector attention moves on from this starter wave entirely.