Welcome back to This Week on NBA Top Shot, a weekly blog from Otis Top Shot and your friends here at MomentRanks that dives into each week’s essential NBA Top Shot news and updates. Pack drops, Flash Challenges, marketplace insights, noteworthy sales, community news — we’ve got you covered on all of it and more.
Everything that happens on Top Shot can be a lot to keep up with — but you’ll be able to find it all here every week. This week was, well…interesting in the Top Shot world. Let’s jump in.
tl;dr: This Week on NBA Top Shot
After the controversy surrounding the drop of the KD Certified Elite Packs last week resulted in the Standard iteration getting delayed until Monday, February 7, the last thing that Top Shot and the community wanted was an issue that further eroded collectors’ trust in the randomization process. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what occurred, though the issue this time around how Three-Star Rookies were distributed across packs.
This blog from NBA Top Shot goes into quite a bit of detail, though the way it’s written is a bit convoluted and has struck many as being too focused on deflection rather than providing a clear, transparent explanation. I’ll do my best to explain the key details below, but let’s start with our weekly market update.
Top Shot Market Update
If the controversies over the past week were supposed to tank the market, then someone must have forgotten to tell the market, because while there hasn’t been any growth, things are still mostly holding steady for now. Let’s take a look at the Marketplace Metrics and this week’s biggest sales.
Top Shot Marketplace Metrics
After continuing to pull out of the slump seen a couple weeks back, the MR100 began to slowly but steadily decline from the middle of this week, finishing at just under 2,200 by Friday morning EST.
The Total Market Cap saw a similar dip after peaking at about $880M, the highest value seen since the end of October, and finished the week just above $850M on Friday. The market cap saw a significant dip on Saturday at 2 a.m. down to $736M, after our team upgraded our Top Shot valuation model. The new model values Moments closer to their realistic selling price, based more rigidly on existing sales data.
Prior to the model update, this small decline in market cap very well could be due to the issues that Top Shot has experienced recently, or perhaps this is just a normal dip that all healthy markets will go through.
Looking now to the 24-hour metrics, the slow decline seen above corresponds with the lowest 24-hour metrics seen this month around February 10 and 11. It should be noted that this dip came right after the largest spike in 24-hour Sales Volume seen all month, and also occurred during a relatively quiet period.
All things considered, I don’t think there’s anything to worry about here; a couple smooth drops should restore everyone’s confidence and the market will react accordingly.
Top Shot Pack Drops This Week
As mentioned above, the one scheduled drop this week was for the delayed KD Certified Standard Packs, which came back on Monday, February 7. Soon after, it was announced that two Stress Tests featuring the new Rising Stars set would be coming on Friday, giving Top Shot an opportunity to further test out the internal fixes to the bugs that had plagued both the Elite and Standard versions of the KD Certified Packs.
KD Certified Pack Drop (Standard)
Before we get into the controversy regarding how this drop ultimately went down, let’s take a look at the details of the KD Certified Standard Packs.
135,000 packs were sold at $19 each, with collectors being allowed between one and four pack purchases at a time based on their Collector Score. Each pack contained 4 Moments —three guaranteed Series 3 Base Set Moments, and one additional Moment ranging from Base Set to Holo Icon, based on the probabilities below.
- Base Set Moment (73.391%)
- Common Game Recognize Game Moment (23.974%)
- Rare MGLE Moment (2.554%)
- Legendary Holo Icon Moment (0.079%)
Based on the information from this blog and some independent fact-checking, this is how the drop went:
- The first 101 collectors effectively experienced the same problem as seen in last week’s Elite drop, where all received packs containing Common Moments.
- It’s unclear how many packs this affected, but likely around 200 or so.
- This marginally increased everyone else’s odds of receiving a Holo Icon, though only by between 0.00006%, and 0.00024%, depending on the number of affected packs.
- Each one of those collectors received a complementary KD Certified Standard Pack.
- This problem was immediately corrected, and the rest of the drop saw a random distribution of packs featuring Legendary, Rare, and Common Moments.
- A new error surfaced regarding the distribution of the highly sought-after Three-Star Rookie Debut Moments, resulting in packs containing a Holo Icon Moment to receive a much higher proportion of these Moments than other packs did.
- According to the blog, this has been fixed, and the fix was monitored in the Stress Tests.
- Based on the hard work of Reddit User ManagementProof2272, we have this spreadsheet containing data on all the Holo-containing packs that also contained a rookie. Here are some key findings:
- 59 of 106 Holo-containing packs also had at least one Three-Star Rookie (55.6%).
- 82 of the 3,662 Three-Star Rookie were in Holo-containing packs (2.2%)
- If those 82 Three-Star Rookie had been randomly spread across the 134,894 packs that did NOT contain a Holo Icon Moment, each pack would have had a 0.06 percent greater chance of containing a Three-Star Rookie.
- Put another way, the odds to get a Three-Star Rookie would have increased by about 6 in every 10,000.
To me, it’s odd the same bug was present once again for the first 101 collectors in this queue, but encouraging that Top Shot was able to fix it swiftly and continue the drop. One would certainly hope that the beginning of this queue wasn’t being treated as a test and that the bug returned despite their initial fix, but we’ll probably never know whether or not that was the case.
Secondly — and more importantly — the new issue regarding the distribution of Three-Star Rookie Moments is certainly alarming and raises some important questions, but was also way overblown by some of the community.
There’s no need for Top Shot to refund anyone for a 0.06 percent reduction in the odds of hitting a Three-Star Rookie Moment, especially when it’d be surprising if 0.06 percent of collectors even knew or cared what those odds were going in. This was an important error, to be sure — there is clear statistical evidence that some Moments were not packaged randomly — but it would be much less talked about had it not come on the heels of last week’s disastrous drop.
However, there are some very big questions being raised as a result of the error that Top Shot should address as soon and with as much transparency as possible.
Chief among these is why Three-Star Rookie Moments are apparently randomized separately or weighted differently than normal Base Set Moments to begin with. While it’s become clear to me that many collectors don’t really understand the results of true randomization, the appearance of such is extremely important to the product’s long-term viability.
If it comes out that Top Shot is trying to force Three-Star Rookie Moments to appear more random across packs by actually manually restricting a truly random distribution, that would be a pretty damaging discovery and invite a lot of easily avoidable criticism.
Rising Stars Stress Tests
As previously mentioned, Top Shot planned and executed two Stress Tests this Friday in order to further ensure that the fixes implemented for both major problems noted in the previous two drops were permanently resolved.
It seems that the Stress Tests were a success, as Top Shot has now announced next week’s Rising Stars Packs for Monday, February 14.
This Week in Top Shot Challenges
Three new Traditional Showcase Challenges finished up this week, while Top Shot experimented with a new week-long Flash Challenge that is likely a precursor of what the future of Flash Challenges may hold. Let’s recap it all below.
Traditional Showcase Challenges
First up, this week saw the conclusion of the Holo Icon S3 Challenge 3, the reward of which was this sweet Franz Wagner dunk that was minted to just 69.
Next, two Showcase Challenges relating to the KD Certified Pack drops finally went live, with MGLE S3 Challenge 6 featuring James Harden, and Game Recognize Game Challenge 1 featuring Kevin Durant himself. The Harden finished with a mint count of just 324, while the KD finished with 6,359 completions.
Flash Challenges
- Day by Day (2/4 – 2/6)
- Requirements:
- A Moment from each of the nightly leaders in points, rebounds and assists on Feb. 4, Feb. 5, and Feb. 6.
- Reward:
- Requirements:
- No Days Off (2/7 – 2/13)
- Requirements:
- A Moments from each of the players who were the daily leaders in points on Feb. 7 and Feb. 8, assists on Feb. 9 and Feb. 10, rebounds on Feb. 11 and Feb. 12, and three-pointers made on Feb. 13.
- Reward:
- Jayson Tatum MSFE Moment
- Requirements:
- Five Boards (2/7)
- Requirements:
- A Moment from the first players to grab five rebounds from each team in games played on Feb 7.
- Reward:
- Requirements:
- Free Throw Frenzy (2/10)
- Requirements:
- Easy: Any Moment from the players who made either the first or last free throw in each of the games on Feb 10.
- Hard: Rare or Legendary Moment from the players who made either the first or last free throw in each of the games on Feb 10.
- Reward:
- Easy: Khris Middleton MSFE Moment
- Hard: Rare Series 2 Pack
- Requirements:
Miscellaneous Top Shot Updates
- Per this blog explaining the aftermath of the KD Certified Elite Pack controversy last week, the planned Holo Icon Challenge for a Jalen Green Moment has been scrapped due to the unfair distribution of Holo Icon Moments, and the Moment will be minted to 99 and distributed in packs instead.
- Across the Dapperverse, NFL All Day and UFC Strike both dropped packs on Friday, February 11, although the Strike pack drop was only a test. The NFL All Day Pro Bowl packs included Moments from players who made the Pro Bowl minted to only 10,000. With the Super Bowl coming this weekend, keep your eyes peeled for any NFL All Day ads as well as announcements about Super Bowl packs to come!
The Week Ahead on Top Shot
It appears that all went well with the Stress Tests on Friday, as Top Shot has announced the arrival of the Rising Stars Elite and Standard Packs on Monday, February 14. This drop will follow the same sort of model as the KD Certified Packs, with similar price points and Collector Score purchase limits.
One important thing to note is that just seven of the planned 24 Rising Stars Moments will be dropped on Monday, with the remaining 17 to come throughout the rest of the month via subsequent drops and challenges.
The announcement also mentions that this will be the first of three All-Star themed drops this month, focusing on both the past and present of All-Star Weekend. Since we know that the All-Star Set will be Rare once again, one has to imagine that the throwback Legendary Set teased in the Series 3 Roadmap will be related to the All-Star Game in some way.
The No Days Off Flash Challenge runs through the weekend, so make sure you stay tuned in to try to snag that Jayson Tatum MSFE! The just announced Add It Up Flash Challenge is also running through the weekend, with the award being a Julius Randle MSFE Moment.
Beyond that, it’s exceedingly likely that Flash Challenges will continue coming in hot throughout the week ahead in varying shapes and sizes, so be on the lookout for announcements from Top Shot to try to stay a step ahead of the competition.
That’s all for this week everyone, thanks for reading and I’ll see you all back here next Friday.