After the Topps MLB Series 1 pack drop on WAX, WAX officials told customers via their official Discord there was no benefit to opening packs quickly. Since cards and serial numbers were randomly distributed, the odds for pulling certain rare cards would be the same regardless of when packs were opened, and those official odds were published on the Topps MLB website.
However, the WAX team didn’t tell the whole truth. In fact, both Topps and WAX left out a huge detail about card distribution that would have greatly impacted when people opened packs.
Soon after packs could be opened, the community discovered that all 25 1-of-1 cards — only found in $100 premium packs — had been accounted for after only 36 percent of packs were opened (it was actually around 10 percent, WAX later reported). Additionally, many serial numbers were not randomly assigned as promised, with almost exclusively top-half of total mint serial numbers assigned to the early pack openers.
Clearly, early opening of packs was advantageous, and Topps and WAX failed to communicate this to their customers.
On Tuesday, WAX published their response to the criticism after the pack drop. However, the response from WAX about the distribution of cards ultimately puts no burden of accountability on WAX and fails to address many pressing issues about how cards are randomly distributed in packs outside of the 1-of-1s.
WAX’s Response to Topps MLB Card Distribution issues
In their response, WAX admits the 1-of-1 distribution issue was much worse than previously expected; all Legendary Exclusive 1-of-1 cards were actually found in the first 2,500 packs (about the first 10 percent) due to the configuration of their odds — not after over 8,000 as previously thought.
Keep in mind, Wax’s official stance in Discord was: “There’s no advantage to opening early, everything is pre-minted.” Additionally, Topps MLB did not disclose this on their website at any time, which WAX entirely blames Topps for.
In their response, WAX dodges responsibility for communication around pack openings and serial number expectations to customers, telling customers they should take responsibility to read the smart contracts and taking jabs at Topps and Flow, a competing blockchain created by Dapper Labs.
“While this information is publicly viewable to everyone on the WAX blockchain, clearly many people did not inspect the Topps MLB ubox.nft smart contract configuration to see it,” WAX wrote on their blog. “The whole idea of smart contracts on a public blockchain is that they can be inspected by anyone.”
WAX followed this by saying they will publicize smart contract odds and the statistically expected per pack frequency for all future drops — an important step toward improvement, but not a real solution for what has already gone wrong in the Series 1 drop. However, it’s also up to Topps MLB to communicate these odds responsibly and clearly.
As someone who purchased Topps MLB packs, this response was far more jarring than the distribution error itself. Again, no one is taking responsibility for a massive mishap with the very first pack drop.
Ultimately, the WAX response falls flat in many ways:
- Blames their customers for not reading very fine print about smart contracts — a difficult subject for many who are new to NFTs to understand.
- Ignores the fact that their official Discord was a primary source for dispersing the faulty information.
- Ignores the other issues outside of 1-of-1s — namely that all randomness of card distribution was statistically impossible and could not have been fully random (read our forum for more on this or Jay Gorrell’s article) and some cards were minted on-demand.
- No apology in any way for miscommunication of distribution odds.
WAX takes aim at Topps and the Flow Blockchain
Not only did WAX not take responsibility for any errors, they actually turned the finger back at other companies.
Wax specifically criticized Topps, their partner in this venture, on their rollout of the project. Early on, WAX and Topps appear out-of-sync, consisting of a front-facing website and card design by Topps while WAX manages the blockchain technology, trading, and distribution side of the collectibles.
In response to how Topps published the pack odds, WAX says: “In hindsight, publishing the cumulative odds for a quantity-limited collectible and a non-quantity limited collectible was probably not a good idea.”
They also go on to add more about how Topps MLB published odds incorrectly: “It might have been helpful if Topps had broken out the specific odds for the limited quantity Legendary Exclusive 1-of-1 70th Anniversary Collectibles … it would have been helpful if Topps had expressed the odds not just in percentage terms but also in other intuitively simple ways such as the statistically expected per pack frequency of a collectible.”
Because WAX smart contracts are publicly available on their blockchain, they also took aim at a competing blockchain built by Dapper Labs, Flow.
They closed the article with the following: “If Topps had conducted the MLB Series 1 sale with traditional digital items, or with physical cards, or on Flow, there would have been no way for the community to reliably ascertain what actually happened.”
On Wednesday night, Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou responded on Twitter, saying: “That you consider Flow and WAX remotely comparable is another wake up call that we need to start marketing our tech at least a little. WAX is an EOS fork. Flow is based on a fundamentally new architecture and programming language that moves the entire space forward.”
What Happens with Topps MLB Now?
Outside of its card distribution issues, in its first week after the Series 1 pack drop, Topps MLB is seeing great sales success with hundreds of thousands of transactions on WAX.
They have exceeded Sorare — the fantasy soccer game — in daily sales almost every day since their launch, and they’ve crept up on NBA Top Shot daily sales in recent days.
Additionally, the pack drop itself was in high demand, with 74,090 packs including over 1.3 million Topps MLB NFTs sold out in under an hour. 137,291 collectors participated in the sale and tried to get packs.
Standard packs, which retailed for $5, are now re-selling on the secondary marketplace for about $80. Premium packs, which retailed for $100, are re-selling for $825. The top sale so far is a Mike Trout #1 Legendary Exclusive, sold for $87,672 just three days after the pack drop.
Clearly, there’s a huge demand for Topps MLB cards. And why wouldn’t there be? It’s the first NFT officially licensed by the MLB, backed by a massive collectibles company that looks to be taking its first step into the metaverse. All of this is very promising for the project, and shows it has great potential.
In no way is this card distribution issue a complete detriment to the Topps MLB project. However, the lack of involvement and time spent officially communicating with customers from Topps is concerning, and there are still many issues that need to be publicly addressed.
One of which is the random number generator for putting cards in packs, which distributed exclusively the top-half serial numbers of rare cards to early premium pack openers at a rate that is statistically impossible. Does this look very random to you?
Privately, WAX has stated that something was off with their random number generator for the first Topps MLB pack release, but they’ve made no public acknowledgement of the issues. And this is only one example of the lack of transparency to customers.
That said, the project has made millions of dollars in the last week — with WAX taking a 10 percent cut of all transactions on the secondary market. They now have the potential to re-invest it into building a strong community around their NFT product.
I’ll still be interested in what comes next for Topps MLB, and certainly will be looking to get in on the next pack drop (which reportedly will be one pack per account per transaction). I’m also holding a handful of my favorite cards with two- and three-digit serial numbers, with no plans to sell.
But it’s up to them to recover from this mishap and regain customer trust by more clearly communicating going forward. There’s still time to come forward and be completely transparent about what happened with the packaging of packs after this first drop. Until then, customers will be left with questions and doubt.
Additional reporting by Max Minsker (@MaxMinsker)