With the release of Alliance Insight, the update to the Forbidden/Limited list, and the slow trod to the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship, players are once again rebuilding their decks as the meta shifts and settles.
Sales Ban Sales
First released back in the Battle of Chaos expansion in 2022, Sales Ban was sitting at a single dollar price average just last December.
The card steadily went on an upward trend, where it climbed to a respectable, if mostly modest, average asking price of about $3 around the end of March 2025.
Then, on the week that saw the update to the Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG Forbidden/Limited list, copies of these cards jumped to a $10 average price on second-hand markets
This trend peaked at just under $11 around the middle of the month before starting to slide back down to a $5-6 average until the month's end.
Then the same pattern repeated itself. On the week of the release of Alliance Insight last May 2nd, second-hand markets like TCGplayer recorded copies of Sales Ban exchanging hands at an increasing upward trend yet again.
At the time of writing this article, copies of Sales Ban are now averaging a $15 market price, with a few near mint condition copies demanding a price north of $30 every so often over at TCGplayer.
Studying Sales Ban
There are a lot of comparisons between Sales Ban and Crossout Designator and Prohibition.
The former allows you to banish a copy of a declared card from the main deck to stop the opponent from using that named card for the turn. The latter can roughly do the same, but it can also target cards from the extra deck.
Unfortunately for Crossout Designator, it’s limited to a single copy in all formats. Prohibition, meanwhile, has a gaping flaw of being left on the field, ripe for removal.
Sales Ban also lacks the Quick Play speed that Crossout Designator has. This devalues the interruption Sales Ban has a little as you would be unable to respond to the opening moves your opponent will make with this particular card.
However, Sales Ban excels at being an excellent board breaker that can shut off a lot of points of interaction if you can make very precise calls.
Furthermore, Sales Ban doesn’t have the cost of needing to shunt your own card into the banishment zone (Crossout Designator) nor leave itself open for cancellation (Prohibition).
End boards with a lot of layered negations and redundancy, like Ryzeal and Maliss, would have a lot fewer resources to work with after a Sales Ban declaration.
This can be especially true if you’re able to find a way to gather information on the opponent’s hand first, like using Triple Tactics Talent. As a side note, Triple Tactics Thrust can also be used to add a copy of Sales Ban to hand because of its Normal Spell nature.
Sales Ban has also spawned some varied rogue tactics with its supposed detrimental effect, like declaring Amano-Iwato to keep it from returning to hand.
The application of Sales Ban is immense, but the skill to wield it can be equally daunting. A player needs to know exactly what card, in particular, they don’t want to deal with for the current turn to get the most value out of this Spell card.
On top of that, Sales Ban is definitely a double-edged sword in cases of a mirror match or if you happen to run copies of the card you declared.
If you plan to run Sales Ban, you would need to run a deck that has an unlikely chance of running into a mirror match. At the very least, you’d need to OTK (One-Turn Kill) the opponent if you find yourself needing to kill your own copy of a declared card, especially if it’s an important engine piece (e.g Ryzeal Detonator).