A new One Piece trading card game has been announced.
According to the new official website for the game, the Straw Hat Pirates' latest battles will occur as part of Bandai's Carddass line. The new TCG will be a completely separate game from previously released card games based on the franchise. The new One Piece card game will be released worldwide, and will launch with four themed starter decks, which will be themed after four different groups from the series: the Straw Hat Pirates, the Worst Generation, the Seven Warlords of the Sea and the Animal Kingdom Pirates. The starter decks will be sold for 990 yen (about $9 USD,) each. The card game's first set of booster packs, entitled "Romance Dawn" - a reference to creator Eiichiro Oda's original working title for his pirate epic - will be sold for about the equivalent of $2 USD. The game is expected to launch in Japan this July, and before the end of the year in the rest of the world. A teaser trailer for the TCG was also released through the official Bandai Carddass YouTube channel.
The announcement did not have any details about the new TCG's mechanics, but preview images from the official website provide a first look at the game's character and action cards.
One Piece first sailed onto the pages of Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine in 1997 and is now the best-selling manga series in history, with a whopping half-a-billion copies in circulation worldwide. In addition to the numerous card games based on the series, Oda's high seas adventure has also been adapted into countless video games, which have been released on almost every console from the last 24 years, ranging from the Game Boy Color to the Nintendo Switch. The most recent interactive entry in the franchise, One Piece: Pirate Warriors 4, was released for the Switch and Sony PlayStation 4 in 2020.
The series tells the story of Monkey D. Luffy, a young boy who gains stretchy powers after eating a mysterious Devil Fruit and becomes the leader of a rag-tag group of adventurers known as the Straw Hat Pirates. Together, they explore the world and compete with other rival pirate crews to unravel the mystery surrounding One Piece, a legendary treasure left behind by an infamous pirate captain.
The One Piece manga is available in English from VIZ Media. The on-going anime series can be streamed from Funimation and Crunchyroll, while select seasons from series are available on Hulu and Netflix. The series also recently returned to cable TV as part of Toonami's late night anime block.
Source: YouTube, One Piece Card Game official website via Siliconera
