What Is Actually in Each Price Bracket — and the Order the Summer Rally Moved Through Them

Our last article split the market into price brackets and found that they behave like different markets. Cards over €100 were far more likely to gain 50% in two months than cards under €100, and €15–40 was the easiest bracket to sell in.

That leaves two obvious questions, and readers asked both. First: what is actually in each bracket? Is a €300 card expensive because of its rarity, its character or its set? Second: does money move between these groups in a pattern? If Mangas rise, do SPs follow a few weeks later?

Before answering, one set needs to be taken out, because it distorts almost every number.

Why Anime 25th Collection gets its own section

EB02 Anime 25th Collection is where the SP and SSP Leader chase cards come from, and no other One Piece set is like it. It has 105 cards with a current price. That is 2.4% of everything we track, but it is 21% of the market's listed value (one copy of every card at its cheapest price). It holds 27 of the 96 cards priced over €500, and 26 of the 42 SSPs.

It also ran on its own schedule. EB02's SSPs were already rising when our daily data starts in late April, weeks before anything else moved. At the peak on 9 July, the typical EB02 SSP was up 233%. The typical SSP from every other set peaked at +15%. A set that moves like that does not tell you how the rest of the market behaves. Mixed into the totals, it makes the high end look far stronger than it was.

So this article reports the market without EB02 as the main view, and shows EB02 alongside wherever it changes the answer. It changed enough in the last article that we have published a correction there. Here is how the odds of a gain moved:

The main result mostly holds: without EB02, cards at €100–300 and above €500 were still two and a half to three and a half times more likely to gain 50% than cards under €100. But a large part of the high-end gains was one set. In the €300–500 bracket, where most EB02 SSPs sat in April, the chance of a +50% gain falls from 19.4% to 5.9%. The chance of doubling above €500 halves or worse. The other change is bigger: the last article found that at €500–1000 the cards that gained were the hardest to sell. Eight of the twelve cards behind that were EB02 cards, seven of them SSP Leaders, and without them the effect disappears. If you did not own EB02 this summer, the expensive brackets were good, but not as good as the full-market numbers suggested.

Part one: every bracket is one rung of the rarity ladder

We took the current price of every card with a recent NM English listing and sorted them into the same brackets as last time. Without EB02, that is 4,317 cards:

Read down the middle column and each bracket is basically one rarity tier. Alt arts sit under €40, and half of them under €5. Leader alt arts are centred on €15–40. SPs run from €15 to €500, mostly €40–300, and not one is under €15. Above €500, two cards in three are a Manga, and 95% of Mangas cost more than €500. The tiers overlap at the edges: a top Leader AA can reach €1,245 (the original Luffy OP01-003), and the cheapest SP is under €20. But you can guess a card's bracket from its rarity alone.

The last column shows why EB02 needed separating. Below €300 it hardly exists: 77 of its 105 cards are cheap base cards and alt arts under €100. Above €500 it adds 27 cards, 25 of them SSPs. With EB02 included, the €1000+ bracket goes from "mostly Mangas" (63% Manga, 22% SSP) to an even split (47% Manga, 43% SSP). In the full market, SSPs look like a peer of Mangas. Outside EB02 they are a much smaller tier: 16 cards, five of them the OP13 Gorosei trading together at €400–450.

This also explains the last article. €15–40 was the easiest bracket to sell in because it is where alt arts and leader alt arts live. Those are the cards people play and swap, so they sell all the time. The €500+ brackets, where selling can take one to two months, are Mangas and SSPs. Few copies exist and few people can buy them. So those results were about rarity tiers as much as prices.

One note on DON!!: the DON!! cards from about €40 up are the premium DON!! from the two The Best (PRB) sets, topping out at €1,049 for the Zoro.

Set matters less than you think

Outside EB02, the set hardly decides the bracket at any price. Old sets (OP01–04), middle sets and recent sets (OP13–17) are spread across every bracket below €300. The two The Best sets (PRB01 and PRB02) show up everywhere, at 18–26% of each bracket, because they are large sets full of reprints and premium DON!! cards.

Above €500 no single set dominates either. In the €1000+ bracket the biggest are PRB01 (17%, its Manga reprints), OP13 (15%) and OP09 (12%). What does show up is when a set was released. Half of the €500–1000 bracket is OP13–17, because a newly released Manga usually lands around €700–1,000 and has not had time to climb. Older top-tier cards cost more: the median SSP from OP09–12 is €2,975, against €700 for one from OP13–17.

So there is really only one set that decides where cards sit, and it is EB02.

Inside a tier, the character sets the price

Rarity picks the bracket, and the character decides where in it a card lands. Here are the median prices inside each tier, split by character, without EB02:

Card counts are in brackets, and some cells are small. The pattern still holds on every row. A Luffy costs several times the same rarity with another character on it, and the premium is biggest at the top. The four non-EB02 Luffy SSPs have a median of €11,199, against €775 for everyone else's. That is why Luffy is 2% of the under-€5 bracket and 29% of the €1000+ bracket: 12 of the 41 most expensive cards outside EB02. With the other Straw Hats added, the crew is 46% of that bracket. Our character popularity study found the same thing in price moves. Here it shows up in price levels.

SPs are the one row where Luffy does not win. The other Straw Hats edge him out, at €485 against €381, though with four Luffy SPs and eight crew SPs that gap is too small to mean much. At the SP level buyers pay for the whole crew. At the SSP and Manga level, they pay for Luffy.

So what is in each bracket? The rarity decides the rung. The character decides how far up that rung the card sits. The set barely matters, unless it is EB02.

Part two: did money move between the tiers?

Now the harder question. To check whether the tiers move in a pattern, we built a price index for each rarity tier. We took every card in that tier that cost at least €5 in the week of 20 April and had a price on nearly every day since. Each day we measured how far each card was from its April price, then took the median. So the index shows what a typical card in the tier did, not what the most dramatic one did. 100 means flat since April.

The summer of 2026 had one clear rally and one clear decline. Without EB02, this is the order the tiers moved in. The table shows when each tier first gained 5% and 10%, when it peaked, and how much of the gain it has kept:

There is an order, and it runs down the rarity ladder. The eight Treasure Rares moved first and hardest, roughly tripling in June, but eight cards is a thin group and they have since given back more than half. Among the big tiers, Mangas moved first, clearing +5% on 3 June. SSPs followed 11 days later and SPs three days after that. Leader alt arts came at the end of June, and regular alt arts on 4 July, a full month after the Mangas. Secret Rares never joined in.

Then look at the last column. The tiers that joined last gave everything back. Leader alt arts and alt arts are both back to their April prices, while Mangas kept 83% of their gain. The August market report saw the same thing from another angle, when alt arts took the damage. The cheap end of the market joined the rally late and left it early. The two tiers that topped out first, Leader AA on 18 July and Alt Art on 2 August, peaked before Mangas and SPs.

The shaded row is why EB02 had to come out. Its SSPs had already gained 5% before our data started, tripled by July and still hold most of it. Included in the SSP index, they make SSPs look like the tier that started the whole rally in May, a month before anything else. Outside EB02, SSPs did not lead anything.

The same wave, measured by price instead of rarity

Because rarity and price go together, the same order shows up if you group cards by their April price:

Outside EB02 the order is clean: cards over €500 moved first, then €100–500 about a week later, €40–100 after another week and a half, and €5–40 last, five weeks after the top. The last column shows EB02 again. It nearly doubles what the €100–500 group has kept (+41% against +23%) and does not touch anything under €100.

Does the top really lead? The week-by-week test

A calendar order can be a coincidence. A better test: when one group has a strong week, does another group have one a few weeks later, more often than the other way round? We compared the weekly price changes of each pair of groups at different delays. A correlation of about 0.44 is the bar for significance with 20 weeks of data.

This is the strongest result in the study. When cards over €500 had a good week, €100–500 cards tended to have one two to three weeks later (0.58). The reverse was 0.09, so this is not two groups that simply move together. The same two-to-three-week delay shows up between €40–100 and €5–40. Money reached the cheaper brackets a step at a time.

EB02 hides this. With EB02 included, the €500+ → €100–500 correlation is flat at 0.27–0.43 across every delay. EB02's own rally, on its own schedule, drowns out the pattern in the rest of the market.

So did Mangas pull SPs up? Outside EB02, mostly yes

This is the pattern we were asked to look for, and it looks different once EB02 is out. On the calendar, Mangas cleared +5% two weeks before SPs (3 June against 17 June). Week to week, SPs follow Mangas one week later (0.49) more than in the same week (0.27). They follow non-EB02 SSPs by two to three weeks (0.53). And Mangas and SSPs move together in the same week (0.71). So it looks like a single top tier of Mangas and SSPs, with SPs following one to three weeks behind.

The strongest Manga weeks point the same way. Four weeks outside EB02 saw Mangas rise 3% or more (31 May, 7 June, 14 June and 12 July). In the three weeks after each one, SPs rose an average of 1.8%, 1.4% and 2.2%, against 0.6% in a normal week. Alt arts rose 0.8%, 1.7% and 1.4%, against nothing in a normal week. One caution: all four of those weeks fell during the rally, when most cards were rising anyway. So this backs up the order. It does not prove that Mangas cause SPs to rise.

Where the idea breaks down is individual characters. If a Manga rising pulled SPs up, it should work best for the same character. Outside EB02, we could test 15 characters who have both a Manga or SSP and an SP. The median correlation between their weekly moves was 0.11 in the same week and −0.09 a week later. That is no connection at all. Some examples:

• Boa Hancock: her Manga (OP07-051) is up 8% since April. Her SPs are up a median of 91% (OP01-078 €525 → €1,040, EB03-026 €520 → €1,139).
• Trafalgar Law: Mangas +8%, SPs +71%.
• Shanks: Mangas and SSPs +8%, SP +44%.

EB02 has the same problem the other way round. The EB02 SSPs of Rob Lucci (€300 → €1,000), Enel (€550 → €1,499) and Carrot (€450 → €1,199) all tripled or more. Their SPs from other sets did nothing: Lucci €43.50 → €40 and €74 → €69.90, Enel €126 → €120 and €145 → €110, Carrot €65 → €65.

So money moved from tier to tier this summer, not from one card of a character to another card of the same character. Rising Mangas were a sign that SPs as a group would follow. They were not a reason to buy the same character's SP.

What to actually do with this

• Treat EB02 as its own market. It is a fifth of the market's value, it moved weeks before everything else, and it is behind a large part of the high-end gains in the full-market figures. If you judge the market from EB02 cards, or EB02 from the market, you will get the wrong picture.
• Know what you are buying before you look at the price. Under €40 you are buying alt arts and leader alt arts, and most of the price comes from the character (a Luffy alt art costs €24, a typical one €5). Above €500 you are mostly buying Mangas, where the rarity is most of the price and, as the last article showed, selling can take months.
• Watch cards over €500 for an early signal. Outside EB02, their good weeks were followed by good weeks for €100–500 cards two to three weeks later. Mangas moved about two weeks before SPs, and a month before alt arts.
• If alt arts are rising after Mangas and SPs already have, you are late. The tiers that join last peak first and give back the most. Alt arts and leader alt arts went back to April prices within about seven weeks of their peak.
• Mangas are the tier that kept their gains. 83% outside EB02, against 59% for SPs and nothing for alt arts.
• Do not expect a character's cards to move together. A Manga rising does not lift that character's SP. Judge each card on its own.

The One Piece Index on Market Insights tracks the market as a whole. Rarity tags, Pull Rate and Popularity are three of the eight parts of the Long-Term score. Now you know why those three matter most at different prices.

Methodology: current prices are the median cheapest NM English CardMarket listing (EUR) over the ten days to 13 September 2026, for the 4,422 cards (4,317 without EB02) with at least four priced days in that window. "Without EB02" removes every card version whose pack set is Anime 25th Collection, not cards whose number starts with EB02, so EB02 reprints in other sets stay in. Rarity tier is the highest special tag we assign to each card (we do not use TCGGO's own rarity field). While preparing this article we fixed gaps in those tags: the PRB01 Manga reprints were not tagged as Mangas, three OP16 SPs and seven Treasure Rares had no tag, and two OP04-083 Sabo versions were wrongly tagged as Mangas. Every number here uses the corrected tags. "Other Straw Hats" means Zoro, Nami, Usopp/Sogeking, Sanji, Chopper, Robin, Franky, Brook and Jinbe. Each tier's index uses a fixed group of cards: priced at €5 or more in the week of 20–26 April, with a price on at least 85% of days since. Each card's price is a 7-day trailing average, and the index is the median of each card's price relative to its April price. So cards released after April (OP16, OP17) are not included, and small tiers like Treasure Rares (8 cards) and non-EB02 SSPs (14) are fragile. The 7-day average delays every tier by the same few days, so the order is unaffected. We left premium DON!! out of the index tables because only four met the coverage rule. EB02's rally had already started before our daily data begins, so its start date is "on or before 27 April". Correlations use about 20 weekly returns, where 0.44 is roughly the bar for significance. The +50% odds table reruns the previous article's method exactly (entry dates 22 April to 13 July, 60-day window), with and without EB02. Most importantly, all of this is one rally and one decline. The order was clear, but one cycle does not prove the next one will follow it. Historical analysis, not financial advice.