Mihawk's manga rare started sliding two weeks before Bandai's ban notice

Dracule Mihawk's OP14-119 manga rare from The Azure Sea's Seven started sliding about two weeks before Bandai posted the notice that banned his OP14-020 Leader, alt arts included, from One Piece play on Oct. 12. The slide deepened once the notice went up. Since the ban took effect, raw copies have climbed back to about $550.

Read the notice Bandai posted on Sept. 24 and it names exactly one card. Bandai said the Leader "significantly restricts the viability of Leader cards with the {Slash} attribute," pulled it from every deck and said it plans to distribute a reworded P-163 Mihawk Leader at future events. OP14-119 isn't a Leader. It's a green Mihawk character card from the same set, a Slash Secret Rare that nothing in the notice touches.

A player who wants OP14-119 in a deck pays $2 for it. Nobody pays hundreds more for the manga when the regular Secret Rare plays exactly the same. The people buying the manga want Mihawk set against panels from Eiichiro Oda's manga, not a card for their deck.

I get why the Leader alt art is down more than half. A Leader is the card a whole deck gets built around. Bandai's notice ended every deck built on that card. The reworded P-163 Leader Bandai plans to hand out at future events still has no date.

The fair worry is that the manga started cooling in early September before Bandai said a word. A slide that starts on its own doesn't need a ban to keep going. But most of the drop came after Bandai posted the notice. That part of the price is collectors reacting to a ban on a different card.

I'd buy a clean raw OP14-119 manga at $530 now, a little under where it's been selling, before OP-18 opens on Nov. 20.