One Piece TCG promo card scalpers are wiping out Weekly Shonen Jump issue 33 in Japan

Scalpers in Japan have bought out issue 33 of Weekly Shonen Jump 2026 across bookstores and shops — not for the manga inside, but for a One Piece Trading Card Game promo card bundled with the issue. Oricon reported the surge, with resellers posting photos of literal car trunkloads of the magazine and listing copies on second-hand sites for upwards of $60. A single issue of Weekly Shonen Jump retails for around 300 yen — roughly $2.

The card in question is a 29th Anniversary Edition One Piece TCG promo, and the irony is that it can be bought separately. Bandai Namco opened pre-orders on July 5 for a bundle containing four non-foil and four foil versions of the same card. Secondhand stores in Japan are also reportedly buying individual copies of the card for a maximum of 1,000 yen — about $6 — meaning scalpers who paid $2 per magazine stand to make roughly $4 profit per copy if they can't find a better offer elsewhere.

Weekly Shonen Jump is one of the most storied manga anthologies in publishing history, home to Dragon Ball, Naruto, Bleach, and Hunter x Hunter over the decades. Issue 33 is a particularly loaded one: it carries Hunter x Hunter chapter 413, Sakamoto Days chapter 267, One Piece chapter 1188, and — most significantly — chapter 250 of Blue Box, the final chapter of Kouji Miura's sports romance series that has run in the magazine since 2021.

Fans of Blue Box are understandably the most frustrated, given that the scalping has made it genuinely difficult to find the issue containing their series' conclusion. The whole situation is made more absurd by the fact that the promo card driving the shortage is freely available to pre-order directly from Bandai Namco — making the scramble to strip shelves largely pointless for everyone involved.