We Asked One Piece Players If They Planned To Sell Their Prize Cards

This past weekend I attended BCG Fest 26-27 feat. One Piece Card Game in Dallas. Besides featuring the invite-only Championship 26-27 Finals (aka "Nats"), this BCG fest was the site of the largest One Piece Card Game event ever held in North America: the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum, an unprecedented two-day 5000-player One Piece tournament with a 1-of-1 card as the grand prize.

After the infamous 2026 BCG Fest in Dallas, Bandai had a few rules in place to keep this year's event running smoothly. Most importantly, you had to have a ticket to one of the two main events in order to attend.

Whether because of that stipulation, or because of the excitement around this one-off event with its unusual tournament structure and exclusive prizes, tickets to the 5000-person North American Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum sold out less than a minute after they went live on June 28th. The internet lit up with frustration from players whose browsers never loaded the order page correctly, and speculation that the tickets had been bought by scalpers who would flip their participation prizes and not play a single round.

I was one of the lucky players whose computer managed to connect to Tixr at exactly 9am CDT, so I went to Dallas hoping to learn more about everyone else who had bought tickets on June 28th. Had scalpers ruined another nice thing for One Piece players, or was this just another case of Bandai under-serving the demand for their flagship game?

To that end, I packed a clipboard and spent my Sunday conducting an extremely low-tech survey of BCG Fest attendees. Here are the six survey questions we asked, and what the responses tell us about the One Piece players who attended the biggest North American event in the game's history.

Some notes on methodology: All 100 of the respondents were surveyed on Sunday, September 21, the day after the Swiss portion of the Flame-Flame Fruit. The vast majority of respondents were either waiting in line to get into the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center in the morning, or waiting to redeem their points from the Auto Matching Battle event in the afternoon.

Bandai hasn't publicized the total attendance at the event, but with 1095 players competing in Nats and a max of 5000 Flame-Flame tickets sold, the total attendance couldn't have been greater than 6095—and was likely lower, since many Nats players also participated in the Flame-Flame Coliseum.

Huge thanks to everyone who took time out of their weekend to participate in this survey!

#1 "What was your Flame-Flame Fruit record?"

These responses show the rough bell curve of wins and losses we'd hope to see from a representative sample of Flame-Flame attendees. More importantly, they confirm that all the respondents I talked to were in Dallas to play the game.

I originally imagined using this question to catch out attendees who were only at the convention to grab copies of the commemorative items, which could be bought once per day. While I can't rule out that some people used their Flame-Flame tickets just to grab merch and leave, only one person I talked to admitted to playing fewer than three rounds of the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum. Even that one respondent was hanging out in a group of friends who had all played on Saturday.

Whatever you imagine a "scalper" is, I didn't meet anyone who fit that stereotype during this survey.

#2 "When did you start playing the One Piece Card Game?"

This question revealed a fairly even spread between when players started playing the game. (The most recent sets were underrepresented, since you had to have been aware of the game by June 28 in order to have registered for the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum.)

It also proved the benefits of experience. Players who started One Piece in 2022 averaged 3.7 wins each across the six rounds of Flame-Flame, while those who started in 2026 averaged just 1.9.

In a tournament where the difference between a 2-4 record and a 3-3 record was a $1000 card, those margins had a huge impact.

#3 "Before this weekend, had you ever competed in a Regional-level One Piece Card Game Event?"

For nearly 40% of respondents, the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum was their first One Piece event bigger than a Store Championship. That's an impressively high figure, and shows how effective this event was at getting more casual players to dip their toes into One Piece's larger organized play experience.

As you'd expect, the more seasoned players had an edge in the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum.

#4 "Did you travel by plane to be here?"

Flying sucks, and it's expensive. We can assume that anyone who took a plane to the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum came from far enough away that they didn't have any other choice.

A flight adds additional transportation costs to get to and from the airport, plus the challenge of arranging lodging around inflexible arrival and departure times. In all, I'd expect anyone who flew to BGS Dallas to have spent a minimum of $1000 over the course of their weekend.

This puts the previous question into perspective. Even among respondents who had never attended a Regional before, 56% flew to Dallas. (That's compared to 77% of respondents who had attended a Regional before). That's a huge portion of fans who aren't used to dropping hundreds of dollars to play One Piece for a weekend, but who made an exception for the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum.

That's not to say that the minority of players who didn't fly were what you'd call "local." Several people I spoke to over the weekend described driving across multiple state lines to attend. When I got bug-eyed at one player who described driving 10 hours to be in Dallas, he shrugged and said he was used to driving up to 15 hours. Gamers are metal like that.

#5 "Do you plan to sell any of the One Piece cards or products you buy or win this weekend?"

This was the most pointed question of the survey, and prompted the widest variety of reactions. Some players chuckled and looked sheepishly at their friends. Some answered emphatically, and others had to think for a long time before settling on a tentative answer.

In the binary world of online discourse, selling is something that scalpers do. True fans, the kind who enjoy One Piece for the game itself, or the art, or the community, treasure everything they have.

53% of players with a record of 4-2 or higher at Flame-Flame (or who competed in Nationals) indicated they planned to sell "most" or "all" of the cards and products they acquired over the weekend, compared to just 3% of players with a record of 2-4 or below.

The reality looks a bit more complicated. The vast majority of respondents had just played One Piece for 5+ hours on Saturday and come back to it again on Sunday, often after flying from far away. But more than half of those players said they planed to sell at least some of what they bought or won over the weekend.

What's more, the players with the best records were the ones most inclined to sell. 53% of players with a record of 4-2 or higher at Flame-Flame (or who competed in Nationals) indicated they planned to sell "most" or "all" of the cards and products they acquired over the weekend, compared to just 3% of players with a record of 2-4 or below. To an extent, this is just intuitive: players who won more Flame-Flame prizes had more cards to sell, and more to gain by selling. But they also indicated greater willingness to sell the commemorative items that everyone at the event had access to, either by participating, or through the carefully rationed Bandai retail store.

#6 "Do you plan to compete in another Regional-level One Piece event before the end of 2026?"

I wanted to see whether the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum was converting more casual players into tournament grinders. About 43% of respondents who hadn't played in a Regional before BCG Fest were either actively planning to go to one before the end of the year, or were at least open to the idea.

They were almost perfectly balanced by the nearly 30% of players who had attended a Regional in the past, but weren't planning to do any more in 2026. The players I talked to often cited the cost in time and money, or the fact that there weren't any upcoming Regionals local to them—another way of describing the same problem.

Conclusion

In the end, I don't think I did a good job sussing out what percentage of Flame-Flame ticket holders were only there to buy stuff they could flip. It's possible Bandai's new rules successfully discouraged would-be scalpers from attending. Or maybe they only showed up during their scheduled retail windows, and were otherwise absent from the event.

At the start of the Flame-Flame Fruit Coliseum, the tournament organizes announced that the player count was "over 4,700," suggesting that at least 4% of ticket holders wouldn't be playing. Pod C showed a player count of 1160, so assuming an even split among the four pods, that would put the total player count at 4,640. Either way, there wasn't a player for every ticket, and some percentage of that discrepancy could be down to bots or scalping.

What this survey did reveal for me was something I should have known all along: competing in One Piece at a high level is costly, in both money and time. The players who love this game enough to travel to dozens of events every year, for four years running, have to make their costs back somehow if they want to keep going. For most players, that means turning their prize cards and retail bundles into next weekend's plane tickets. At least last weekend, these players vastly outnumbered any scalpers.

The other big takeaway for me is that exciting prizes are a tremendous motivator. The Flame-Flame Fruit brought tons of new players into the more competitive side of the One Piece Card Game, many of whom seem eager to keep playing. The organized play scene needs them too, to fill in for players who've been lost to attrition (see the point above).