Breaking Down the First Rare and Legendary Drops from S3
Putting the MGLE and Deck The Hoops announcements into context
Yesterday, Top Shot announced the Deck The Hoops and Metallic Gold LE pack drops will be happening next Tuesday December 21st. This is the first rare and legendary offerings of Series 3, so it’s definitely worth spending some time digesting these announcements.
As with everything we do here at #ShowMeTheData, we will spend some time going over the facts that we currently know. Then, we will break out some assumptions that we can make by extrapolating some hisotrical data. Finally, I’ll give some of my thoughts on some of the more nuanced aspects to these drops.
Breaking Down the MGLE’s
In Series 2, there was a total of 150 MGLE moments and we’ve already gotten confirmation from the Series 3 roadmap that this is going to stay consistent in Series 3. Since the MGLE set is one of Top Shot’s premier flagship sets, I don’t see any reason why the change the way these moments are distributed. I would expect that we will see 135 moments available in packs and 15 earnable through Showcase Challenges (most likely requiring nine MGLEs each).
Expected Value Projection
Tuesday’s pack price is $89 which is a $10 discount from the standard $99 MGLE pack price we were accustomed to in Series 2 (remember the $24 price point for the MGLE Release 3 was a one-off throwback). The mint count for the Series 3 MGLEs is 749 which is a 50% increase compared to Series 2.
We are getting one MGLE and 5 base moments which is consistent with S2. Since we don’t know many of the players that are going to be included yet, I will just take a look at some price data for the 134 MGLE moments that were distributed in packs during S2 (LaMelo Ball was the 135th “distributed” moment but it was an airdrop).
Current Expected Value = $184 → extrapolated for a /749 mint would be $123
Current Floor = $60 → extrapolated for a /749 mint would be $40
MGLEs within 20% of Floor = 20 moments or 15% of the distributed MGLEs
MGLEs valued under the S2 $99 pack price = 60 moments or 45% → extrapolating this to S3 mint count shows that 85 moments or 63% could be under the $89 price
In conclusion, I am projecting that the Expected Value of the first S3 MGLE packs will be around $100 to $130 once all challenge utility is squeezed out (more on that later). This of course isn’t going to make you rich overnight by any means, but I think it’s a good thing that these will be skewed in the slightly positive direction. Unfortunately, the harsh reality of increasing the mint count by 50% but only decreasing the pack price by 10% means that almost 60% of the MGLEs could be considered “losers” from a purely monetary standpoint. This would be a 20% increase from what users experienced during Series 2.
Distributing the Series 3 MGLEs
As a reminder, here is how the 66,866 MGLEs were distributed in packs in S2.
Legendary Deck The Hoops (3 per pack) - 2,805 MGLEs
Legendary Holo Icon 1/2/3 (3 per pack) - 24,057 MGLEs
Legendary Finals (3 per pack) - 3,600 MGLEs
Rare MGLEs (1 per pack) Drop 1 - 11,631; Drop 2 - 18,927; Drop 3 - 5,846
As you can see, roughly 45% of the MGLE moments in Series 2 were distributed in Legendary packs, while the remaining 55% came out in the premium MGLE rare packs. Why does this matter? I don’t know yet, let’s keep going though.
There is a total of 101,115 MGLEs that need to be distributed in Series 3. Let’s see how we are tracking right now given the information that we currently know.
On Tuesday, we will see roughly 500-600 Deck The Hoops packs (470 in queue + 15ish airdrops + a handful in reserve). We will also see roughly 13500-15000 MGLE packs (13000 in queue + 80ish airdrops + reserve). This equates to roughly 15% of the total MGLE supply coming out during this drop.
We know there will be 5 more legendary drops this series (two Holo Icon drops, one more “historical” set, one Rookie, and the NBA Finals set). With this information, we can draw one of two conclusions:
If each Legendary pack only includes 1 MGLE (like DTH currently does), then that means only 13-15% of the MGLEs will be included in legendaries this season compared to the 45% in Series 2. It also means that we will be getting roughly 1.5X more MGLE pack drops in Series 3 compared to the 0.5X we would assume based on solely on mint count. Additionally, if they continue to come out at the current pace we are seeing in the MGLE Release 1, then that also means there could be a total of six different releases rather than the three we saw last year.
If #1 isn’t true, and I’ll be honest five more MGLE drops in addition to the other five rare drops outlined in the roadmap seems like a lot to jam in here, then we can safely assume that either the Holo Icon packs or all of the future legendary packs will include more than one MGLE.
Ok so why is this important? Besides being fun for nerds like me to try and play around with the numbers, I think it also highlights why this Deck The Hoops drop could be more valuable than most collectors think. More on that later.
MGLE Challenges
Let’s circle back to the MGLEs that are coming on Tuesday. With roughly 15000 total MGLEs coming out into circulation there’s a few different ways they could handle this.
Only release 20 MGLE moments and include their full /749 supply across these two drops.
Release 36-54 MGLE moments like they did during each wave last season, but only include a partial supply for each in these drops.
How I would do it (doesn’t really matter I’m like 0 for 5 on getting these right): Release 9 MGLE moments at full supply and 18 moments at 2/3rd supply.
Throughout Series 2, Top Shot was very stringent in their approach to MGLE challenges. They purposefully did not run any challenges requiring a moment until that moment was fully distributed in packs. Option 3, allows for them to start up the challenge machine with the 9 that are fully released, and also makes it so a good majority of supply is out in the wild for the other moments in this release. Option 2 would make it so the supply for these moments is artificially deflated until the next drop, which wouldn’t be a good precedent to set for collectors. Option 1 is kind of random and doesn’t really align with how they did things in Series 2.
This is mostly speculation at this point, but I would recommend paying very close attention to the # of packs created for each of these drops as well as the supply of MGLEs that is released for each moment. It should be very telling for how we want to buy/sell/hold this first batch of MGLE moments.
(or you can just subscribe and I’ll do it all for you)
Will Deck The Hoops be Truly Legendary?
I spent most of my time today talking about the MGLEs because I think those are the waters that most of us swim in, however it’s worth touching on these Deck The Hoops legendary moments. Tuesday’s pack price is $999 which is in line with the pack prices for Holo Icon 1 and 2 from Series 2. The mint count for these DTH moments are /55 which is a 35% DECREASE compared to this same set in Series 2. As I’ve touched on above, these packs include 1 legendary, 1 MGLE, and 7 base set moments.
Expected Value Projection
I’ll quickly touch on the Series 2 DTH stats. The mint count is /85, the average value is currently $5,050, and the set is jam-packed with studs including LeBron, Giannis, Luka, Tatum, and Zion (he still counts right?). This will be the last time I talk about the S2 DTH set when projecting the S3 one because I don’t think it’s a good comparison. This pack dropped in early January of 2021 which was before a large majority of the current Top Shot userbase was onboarded to the platform. Due to this, the cohort of collectors that currently hold these S2 moments aren’t necessarily the same cohort that will be buying these packs on Tuesday afternoon. I expect the dynamics will work quite a bit differently than what we saw in S2.
Instead, I will take a peak at all of the Holo Icon and 2021 NBA Finals legendaries from Series 2 that were distributed in packs.
Current Expected Value = $1680 → extrapolated for a /55 mint would be $3024
Current Floor = $700 → extrapolated for a /55 mint would be $1260
Legendaries within 20% of Floor = 20 moments or 23% of the distributed
Legendaries valued under the S2 $999 pack price = 40 moments or 43% → extrapolating this to S3 mint count would show 0 moments under pack price (implied floor would be $550ish range)
Now I don’t think we can broadly use mint count comparisons to project this pack, because there are plenty of other non-material factors that probably need to be accounted for here. I won’t spend too much time on these but if you’ve been on Top Shot Twitter at any time over the last few months you know what they are.
I am projecting that the Expected Value of the first S3 legendary packs will be around $1800 to $2200 once all challenge utility is squeezed out. Keep in mind that this is extremely extremely rough and hard to fully project without seeing the pack list. I will definitely be fine tuning this before the pack drop next Tuesday as we get more information.
Sneaky Value in the Power of the Bottleneck
It makes sense that there will be 10 players included in this drop, since that would equate to 550 packs. We know 470 will be for sale, and 15ish will be airdropped, so the rest would be saved for reserve. We also already know that two of these moments will be new bottlenecks for Full Team Sets.
Kevin Garnett - Celtics (current bottleneck Kelly Olynyk /275 is $1599)
Anthony Davis - Pelicans (current bottleneck Jrue Holiday /3342 is $150)
Additionally, two of these moments will simply be additional supply for players which are already bottlenecks.
Jimmy Butler - Bulls (current bottleneck at /275 is $2299)
Kawhi Leonard - Spurs (current bottleneck at /751 is $580)
We also know that Klay Thompson and Dwyane Wade will be available but we have four more players that we still don’t know about yet. I’m not going to try and project the value of these moments right now because we’ve seen in the past that it takes a while for some of these moments to realize the “squeeze” that comes with being a bottleneck. However, this is most definitely a factor that is in play which will help elevate the overall value of this historical DTH set.
When talking about bottlenecks, I would encourage everyone to read through the narrative that Top Shot issued in their S3 Collector Score blog. This sentence in particular stuck out to me: “This bonus is not for the faint of heart, as the Run It Back set and upcoming Legendary historical sets will make it nearly impossible to acquire ALL of the Moments from every player on a specific team across all series.” Because of this, I do not think that Top Shot will be actively trying to supplement every legendary or rare bottleneck with a subsequent archive-type common moment. Of course, many different sets and moments could be released over the course of the next few months or years that would release the pressure of these bottlenecks, but just be prepared if this doesn’t happen immediately if at all!
I think that about wraps it up for this post. Please subcribe to #ShowMeTheData if you want to get access to insights like this on a daily basis in our Discord channel. In addition, I will be posting detailed EV calculations for both of these packs in my Google Sheets once more information comes available!
Breaking Down the First Rare and Legendary Drops from S3
I had no idea what I was getting into when I subscribed to this. These are some great analytics. Thank.