Are Pandaman Alts Counting as Hits in OP-17 Boxes?

One Piece Card Game boxes are seeded, which means that when you open a box, you can expect to walk away with two or three hits, which in this game is considered to be a SEC or an alt art (although alt arts themselves have their own internal rarity logic).

But OP-17, the long-awaited fourth anniversary set and one of the game’s most hyped ever, is proving to be a bit more complicated than that thanks to a card whose inclusion was originally meant to be an inside joke.

Pandaman, the Easter egg character who’s appeared as a background gag since the East Blue saga, shows up in OP-17 as an alt art treatment for a few common and uncommon cards across each color: Kingdew, Hajrudin, Kyo, Charlotte Daifuku, Building Snake, and Scratchmen Apoo. Each of those cards keeps its original name and text, with Pandaman drawn into the art in place of the character it's named after. 

Notably, these cards still have a star symbol above their rarity marker, which means they’re technically alt arts, but they don't have foil, texturing, or any of the production flourishes that normally signal a card is valuable.

The problem is that some boxes appear to be counting them as hits.

Over the last week, reports have been circulating of boxes coming back with a single alt art and a Pandaman, which would seem to suggest Bandai is counting Pandaman alts as a hit. Pro player Krullzor pulled one such box, with many of the responses to his post claiming to have pulled similarly. On the other hand, plenty of other players are reporting boxes with a full three hits plus a Pandaman on top, which suggests the opposite. 

The likeliest explanation right now is that the one-hit Pandaman boxes are errors, and that theory tracks with everything else going on in this set. I've opened error packs in OP-17 myself that defy in-pack logic that’s existed since I started playing. Some packs have come with a single rare when they're supposed to contain at least two, and others have come with two rares and an SR when the configuration is typically a rare and an SR. 

Another possibility is that this is simply a quirk of how this set is mapped out at a case level, and that while some players can get very lucky with their hits and Pandamans, others can get very unlucky. 

Op Op Fruit

Gems: 701

Open Op Op Fruit

None of this is much comfort if you're the one who paid for a marked up box and opened a Panda + alt. For now, there’s not much to do but enjoy the Pandaman gag for the funny bit that it is, and pray not to open a Panda + alt box yourself.

Have you pulled a Pandaman box? Let us know what was in it.

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