Should You Buy at Release, or Wait? We Tracked Two Sets From Day One
It is the most repeated piece of advice in the hobby: don't buy a new set at release, wait for prices to settle. Everybody says it. Almost nobody has put a number on it. How far do prices actually fall? How long until they stop falling? And does it apply to every card in the set, or only some of them?
We now have the data to answer that, because two sets have been released since OPMT started recording daily prices: OP15 Adventure on Kami's Island (mid-April 2026, now ~17 weeks old) and OP16 The Time of Battle (21 June 2026, now 7 weeks old). We tracked every card in both from the first day singles had a price.
The short version: waiting was worth about 30% on OP16 so far, the dip does not start immediately, the bottom for OP15 landed around week 8–11, and the cards that recover are not the cards most people buy. One finding surprised us enough that it changes how we'd approach a release entirely — sealed product went the other way.
How we measured it
For each set we take the release week as week 0, then follow the same cards week by week and report the median per-card change from their release-week price. Prices are the cheapest listed near-mint English copy on CardMarket, the same series behind our monthly market reports.
Two deliberate choices. First, we exclude bulk under €1. Of the 153 OP16 singles we track, 115 sat under €1 at release and their median move over seven weeks was exactly 0.0% — a €0.02 common is not a price, it is a floor, and including that mass would drown out every real signal. Second, we use the median rather than the average, so one €900 Manga rare cannot speak for a whole set.
As a sanity check we re-ran OP16 against a completely independent price series — the API's 7-day average across all conditions rather than our cheapest-NM-English figure. It returned −30.1% where our main series says −29.3%. Two different measurements of the same seven weeks agree, so what follows is not an artefact of how we pick a price.
OP16: seven weeks, −29.3%, and still falling
OP16 singles first got prices on 21 June 2026. Here is every week since, for the 38 cards worth at least €1 at release:
| Week | All singles ≥€1 (n=38) | Chase ≥€20 (n=21) | Mid €5–20 (n=14) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 — 21 Jun | — | — | — |
| 1 | +1.5% | +1.5% | +0.7% |
| 2 | −2.6% | 0.0% | −4.8% |
| 3 | −8.8% | −7.7% | −8.0% |
| 4 | −12.0% | −12.0% | −12.0% |
| 5 | −20.0% | −15.4% | −24.4% |
| 6 | −21.0% | −20.8% | −20.2% |
| 7 — 9 Aug | −29.3% | −28.0% | −33.6% |
Three things stand out. The first week was up, not down. Prices rose 1.5% in week 1 and were still only −2.6% at week 2. If you sampled the market a fortnight after release you would have concluded the "wait for the dip" advice was nonsense. The decline only became obvious in week 3 and it has accelerated since — the steepest single week so far was the most recent one.
It is broad, not a few bad cards. Of the 31 OP16 singles worth €8 or more at release, 25 are down and 6 are up, median −30.0%.
And it is specific to the new set. Over the exact same seven weeks, the same measurement applied to every other tracked set — 581 singles worth €8+ — returned +3.4%, and the €20+ chase cards among them +5.2%. So this is not a market-wide slump that OP16 happened to sit in. While the rest of the market drifted up ~3%, the new set fell 29%. The gap between buying OP16 at release and buying almost anything else was roughly 33 percentage points in seven weeks.
The individual damage is heavy at the top of the set: Shiryu (OP16-108) €15.99 → €7.25, −54.7%; Kin'emon (OP16-082) €18.98 → €9, −52.6%; the Leader alt-art Marshall.D.Teach (OP16-080) €37.99 → €20, −47.4%; and the set's marquee alt-art Luffy (OP16-022) €81 → €48.99, −39.5%. The handful that gained were mostly cards that started cheaper: Portgas.D.Ace (OP16-118) €19.99 → €23.95, +19.8%.
OP15: where the bottom actually is
OP16 is only seven weeks old and clearly has not finished falling, so it cannot tell us when to buy. OP15 can — it is 17 weeks past release and we have every week of it.
| Week | All singles ≥€1 (n=49) | Chase ≥€20 (n=26) | Mid €5–20 (n=14) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 | −3.2% | −5.6% | −4.2% |
| 4 | −2.5% | −3.7% | −2.9% |
| 6 | −7.5% | −6.5% | −6.1% |
| 8 | −9.1% | −5.7% | −10.8% |
| 10 | −2.9% | +16.7% | −9.4% |
| 12 | 0.0% | +17.2% | −7.3% |
| 14 | 0.0% | +15.5% | −9.9% |
| 16 — 4 Aug | 0.0% | +3.1% | −15.1% |
The shape is clear: a slow bleed to a trough around weeks 8–11 at roughly −9%, then a recovery back to release price by about week 12. The typical OP15 card bought on release day is, four months later, worth exactly what you paid — you simply had your money parked for a third of a year and rode a 9% drawdown to get there.
But the aggregate hides the real story, which is that the tiers went in opposite directions. The €20+ chase cards bottomed earlier and shallower (−7.4% at week 7), then turned and ran to +17.2% by week 12. The €5–20 middle tier never recovered at all — it ground down all the way to −15.1% and was still making new lows at week 16. Same set, same weeks, +17% versus −15%.
Which cards come back — and which don't
Sorting OP15's cards by rarity tag over its full 17 weeks makes the split even starker:
| Rarity tier | Cards | Median, release → week 17 |
|---|---|---|
| SP | 8 | +45.8% |
| Leader alt-art | 6 | +1.9% |
| Alt-art | 24 | −2.0% |
| Manga | 2 | −16.0% |
| No special tag | 5 | −24.3% |
| Secret rare | 3 | −53.1% |
The scarcest pulls — the SPs you find in OP15 packs — gained 45.8% while the secret rares lost more than half their value. The winners list is dominated by cards that were not the obvious pick-up at release: Nami (OP15-086) €24.90 → €115, +361.8%; the EB04 Luffy pulled from OP15 packs €28.50 → €60, +110.5%; Brook's Leader alt-art €28 → €49.99, +78.5%. The losers were the cards everyone wanted in April, when Enel was the face of the set: his alt-art fell €17.40 → €5.80 (−66.7%), his secret rare €27.25 → €10.50 (−61.5%), his Leader alt-art €49.90 → €28.99 (−41.9%).
That is the pattern worth internalising. Release-week hype prices the set's headline character, and that is exactly the money that evaporates. The cards that appreciate are the genuinely scarce pulls and the ones the hype cycle ignored. It is also why our Long-Term score weights pull rate at 21% and rarity tags at 11%, but gives raw price momentum no weight at all by default.
The finding we did not expect: sealed went the other way
While OP15's singles spent four months going nowhere, its sealed product did this:
| Product | At release | 9 Aug | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| OP15 Booster Box Case | €1,450 | €2,490 | +71.7% |
| OP15 Booster Box | €134.95 | €174.99 | +29.7% |
| OP15 single pack | €5.00 | €5.00 | 0.0% |
| OP16 Booster Box | €145.00 | €142.50 | −1.7% |
| OP16 Booster Box Case | €1,950 | €1,900 | −2.6% |
An OP15 booster box bought at release is up 29.7% and a case is up 71.7%, over a period when the median OP15 single returned 0% and the €5–20 tier lost 15%. And during OP16's brutal seven-week singles crash, OP16 sealed barely moved — −1.7% for a box against −29.3% for the singles inside it.
The mechanism is straightforward once you see it. The singles dip is a supply event: release-window box opening floods the offer books with exactly the cards everyone is opening. Sealed product is the other side of that trade — every box opened is a box that no longer exists, so supply only tightens. The dip you are waiting out as a singles buyer is the same dip that pays sealed holders.
One honest caveat: sealed prices here are thin markets with few listings, and a case going €1,450 → €2,490 is a handful of offers, not a liquid quote. Treat the direction as solid and the magnitude as rough.
So — should you wait?
- Yes, if you are buying singles — but not for two weeks, for two months. OP16 was still slightly up at week 1 and only −2.6% at week 2. The pain arrives in weeks 3–8. OP15 bottomed at weeks 8–11.
- Buying the set's most hyped card at release is the single worst version of this trade. Every one of OP15's four biggest losers was an Enel — the character on the box.
- The €5–20 tier is where value goes to die. In OP15 it never recovered in 17 weeks; in OP16 it is the worst-performing tier so far at −33.6%. Sample sizes here are small (n=14 in both sets), so hold this one loosely — but it points the same way in both.
- If you want release-window exposure, sealed is the cleaner expression. It gains from the same box-opening that sinks the singles.
- OP16 has not bottomed. At week 7 it is still making its steepest weekly declines, and if it follows OP15's shape the trough is somewhere in the next month. That does not make today's price a bad one — it makes it an unfinished one.
We will revisit this when OP16 clears week 16 and we can put its full arc next to OP15's. In the meantime, the Short-Term view is where a set's falling floor shows up first, and the inflection worth watching is not the lowest price — it is the week the scores stop falling.
Methodology: prices are the cheapest listed NM English copy on CardMarket per card version, recorded daily. Week 0 is the first day a set's singles carried prices — 21 June 2026 for OP16, 14 April 2026 for OP15; OP15's release week is inferred from when its cards entered our price feed and may be off by a few days. Each figure is the median percentage change of the same fixed basket of cards versus their own week-0 price, so composition cannot drift. Cards under €1 at release are excluded from tier medians (their median move was 0.0%). Every card version is credited to the set whose packs actually contain it, which is why EB04 and OP12 cards appear in OP15's numbers. The control group is all tracked cards outside the two sets over the identical dates. Caveats: this is two sets and roughly four months of data, not a law of the market; high-end and sealed prices sit in thin markets where a single listing moves the floor; and OP16's arc is incomplete. Informational only, not financial advice.