Is It Worth Opening a Booster Box? What Every One Piece Set Pays Back

Every collector has stood in front of a sealed box and done the maths in their head. €175 for 24 packs. There's a Manga Rare in there somewhere, and an alt-art Leader, and the SEC. Would you get your money back?

We can answer that properly. OPMT keeps a pull rate for every special card in every set, the daily price of every card, and the daily price of every sealed box. Put them together and you get the expected value of a box: what its contents are worth on average, if you opened enough of them. We also ran a simulation that opens each box 50,000 times, because an average is not what happens when you open one.

The short version

• Only four sets average back their price: OP13 (121%), OP17 (112%), EB02 (99%) and OP11 (94%). In each one, a single Luffy that turns up in roughly one box in 50 to 150 does most of the work.
• The typical box is far worse than the average. The median OP13 box holds €44 of cards for a €315 box. Across every set, a single box covers its price between 2% and 23% of the time.
• OP15 and OP14 are the boxes for people who enjoy opening. They are cheap, and their value is spread over many mid-priced hits instead of one lottery card. OP15 has the best typical box of any set (€69) and gets at least half its price back 39% of the time.
• Old boxes are worth more sealed. An OP01 box costs €900 and its contents average €238. Most of what you pay for is the seal itself.
• DON!! cards matter only in The Best. In PRB01 they add €34 a box, mostly from the gold DON!! (average €134). It is still the worst box to open at today's price.

How we calculated it

Pull rates. Every special card in OPMT has a pull rate: how many packs it takes, on average, to find one copy. That covers SECs, alt arts, alt-art Leaders, SPs, SSPs, Manga Rares, Manga Event cards and Treasure Rares. These rates power the Pull Rate part of our Long-Term score. They are our own estimates, not figures from Bandai. A card counts for the set whose packs it comes in: Luffy's OP05-119 SSP counts for OP11, and the EB04 cards count for OP14 or OP15.

DON!! cards. An OP or EB box has 2 foil DON!! cards, and each 12-box case has 2 gold ones in place of foils. The Best boxes have one DON!! in every pack: 18 regular and 2 foil per box, with 2 golds per 10-box case.

Box sizes. 24 packs for OP and EB boxes, 20 for PRB01 and PRB02.

Prices. The median of the last 10 days of the cheapest NM English listing on CardMarket, for every card and every box. That is what you would pay to buy each card. Selling nets less once you pay CardMarket's fees and postage and undercut the cheapest copy.

What we left out. Commons, uncommons, rares and super rares. In every main set their median price is €0.02, and a box's worth of them adds a few euros at most. EB05 is not included because we don't have pull rates for it yet.

Every set, ranked

Average contents = special cards plus DON!! cards at today's prices. Typical box = the median of 50,000 simulated openings. *The Best boxes also contain reprinted commons and uncommons, some listed at €1–3, which we could not model. Their figures are a floor.

Read the table in two halves. The average tells you what the set is worth to someone who opens a hundred boxes. The typical box and the two odds columns tell you what happens to someone who opens one. They are very different numbers. In every set the typical box is worth a fraction of the average, because a big part of the average sits in cards that almost nobody pulls.

The four sets that average a profit, and why that is misleading

OP13's average of €382 is real, but more than a third of it is one Luffy Manga that turns up in roughly one box in 144. Add Sabo's and Ace's Manga Rares and the top three cards carry 65% of the box. Take them out and an OP13 box is worth 42% of its price, which is about where OP14 and OP15 sit.

OP11 is the extreme case. Its two Luffy SSP versions, reprints of OP05-119 at €9,500 and €12,499, account for 72% of everything an OP11 box is worth. Without its top three cards the box returns 17% of its price. Only 6% of simulated OP11 boxes paid for themselves.

EB02 is the exception, as it usually is in our studies. Its chase cards are less rare (a Manga Rare one box in 48, the Luffy alt-art Leader at €990 about one box in 12) and the SP and SSP Leaders spread the value over 52 cards. That is why EB02 has the best odds of any set: 23% of boxes paid for themselves, twice the rate of OP13. It is also a €539 box.

So "OP13 pays back 121%" is true for a shop opening cases. For you, opening one box, it means a 12% chance of covering the box and a typical result of €44.

The best boxes to actually open: OP15 and OP14

If you want to open packs and come away with something, the cheap recent sets do best. Their value is spread out instead of sitting in one lottery card:

• OP15 (€175): the top card is a €30 Jewelry Bonney alt-art Leader that turns up in a third of boxes. No single card is worth more than 9% of the box, and without the top three it still returns 46% of its price, the highest of any set. The EB04 cards in its packs mean an OP15 box averages 4.2 special cards, against 2.2–2.6 for most sets. Typical box €69, and 39% of boxes get at least half the price back.
• OP14 (€155): the same story with a slightly lower floor. Mihawk's Manga Rare, Buggy's SSP and a Zoro SP each account for 11–13% of the box. 25% of boxes get half the price back.
• OP16 (€155): lower overall (47%), but a typical box of €35 and no lottery dependence. The top card is a €354 SP.

None of them pays back on average. If you want specific cards, buying the singles is still cheaper than opening for them, in every set. But if you open for the fun of it, these boxes give you the most in return.

Old boxes: you are paying for the seal

The older a set, the further its box price drifts from what is inside. Sealed boxes of sets that are out of print become collectibles in their own right. Each one opened makes the remaining ones scarcer, while the singles inside stay plentiful because thousands of boxes were already opened. An OP01 box at €900 holds €238 of cards on average and €68 in a typical box.

This is not a reason to dismiss sealed product. It is a reason not to open it. If you own an old box, the box is the asset. Opening it turns it into, on average, about a quarter of its value in singles. EB01 is the starkest case: its value inside rests on one Chopper Manga Rare (71%), and only 2% of simulated boxes got even half the price back.

The Best sets and their DON!! cards

The Best boxes are built differently. Every pack has a DON!! card, and some of them are worth real money. In PRB01 the gold DON!! cards average €134, led by Zoro at around €950. In PRB02 the golds average €55, led by Yamato at around €180. Foils average €2.59 and €1.50, and regular DON!! cards are bulk.

Added up, DON!! cards are worth €34 a box in PRB01 and €15 in PRB02. That is a third of PRB01's whole average, but it does not change the verdict. With fewer special cards per box (about 1.1, because most of The Best's reprints are spread thin), PRB01 holds €100 of cards on average for a €598 box. It has the same problem as OP01: the box is priced as a collectible. PRB02 at €250 returns 44%, comparable to OP16.

Elsewhere DON!! cards barely register. OP17's gold DON!! cards average €13, which works out to €2.64 a box. EB03's average €35, worth €7 a box. In the other sets the foil DON!! cards are worth a few cents.

What to actually do with this

• If you want a card, buy the card. In 18 of 22 sets the contents average less than the box. In the other four the average depends on cards you will very likely not pull.
• If you open for fun, open OP15 or OP14. They are cheap, the value is spread out, and they have the best typical box and the best odds of getting half your money back.
• If you're chasing a big hit, know the odds. OP13, OP17 and OP11 average a profit only because of a Luffy that turns up in about one box in 100 to 150. EB02 is the most forgiving lottery (23% of boxes paid back) and the most expensive ticket.
• Keep old boxes sealed. From OP01 to OP09, EB01 and PRB01, the box costs between 2.5 and 6 times the average value of the cards inside.
• Recheck before you buy. These figures move with the market. A big Manga Rare halving in price would take OP13 from 121% to under 100% overnight. Current card prices are on each card's page and the set pages.

If you are wondering whether to buy a set at release or later, we tracked that in Should You Buy at Release, or Wait?

Methodology: prices are the median of the daily cheapest NM English listing on CardMarket from 12 to 21 October 2026, for both cards and booster boxes (single boxes, excluding cases and the OP01 pre-errata box). The contents of a box are every card in OPMT's pull-rate table for that set (SEC, alt art, alt-art Leader, SP, SSP, Manga Rare, Manga Event and Treasure Rare). Each card appears in a pack with probability 1 / its packs-per-card figure, and counts for the set whose packs contain it, which can differ from its card number (cross-set SPs, SSPs and Manga Rares; EB04 cards in OP14 or OP15). Pull rates are OPMT's estimates, not official figures. DON!! cards: OP and EB boxes hold 2 foil DON!! with 2 gold per 12-box case replacing a foil; PRB boxes hold 18 regular and 2 foil with 2 gold per 10-box case. Each character's DON!! versions are ranked by price into those tiers, and each design within a tier is treated as equally likely. Boxes are 24 packs (OP, EB) or 20 (PRB). Commons, uncommons, rares and super rares are excluded; their median price is €0.02 in every main set, except The Best, whose reprinted commons and uncommons list at €1–3 but whose distribution we could not model, so PRB01 and PRB02 are lower bounds. The simulation opens 50,000 boxes per set, with packs independent and at most one special card per pack. Real boxes are collated, so actual results are probably less spread out than simulated. The averages do not depend on this. One known fake listing is excluded. EB05 is not included (no pull rates yet). Values are at buying prices and exclude fees and postage. Analysis, not financial advice.