Cool Cats 4 - Projections & Potential?!
Breaking down the last 24 hours of the CC4 challenge and what to expect for the remainder of the week
Since Cool Cats are the talk of the town right now, I figured I would spend this week’s long-form analysis trying to breakdown every possible aspect of it!
For those of you who have not yet decided to join us on the Premium Side, here are a few of the things we covered this week:
4/13 - How to identify “other” moments that will benefit from a legendary pack release & a crazy way to get the next Holo pack for a 50% discount!
4/13 (night) - Cool Cats 4 Commons theory…I sent this out before I even started buying and well before it was circulating on Twitter/Youtube. Ended up being wrong, but some people still made a few bucks.
4/14 - Why the first couple hours after a pack drop are so critical and where at least 16% of the Holo Icon collectors went wrong.
4/15 - My projections for how the Cool Cat moments would move in the first few hours after the pack drop. Introduced a new BUY/HOLD/SELL tool that live updated every few minutes during the first 4 hours after the MP opened up. This alone probably paid for a few months of premium!
After having a laser focus on the Cool Cats market yesterday afternoon, I initially wanted to do a long de-brief of everything I witnessed and how we can learn from it. Luckily for me, @NBATopShotTalk beat me to it and put out a really great video this morning. He talked through the cooldown timers, how the commons differed from the Cool Cats themselves, and some potential add-ons to the TS website that would probably prevent a lot of people from getting burned. Go and give it a watch as a nice primer.
That leaves me with plenty of time to talk about the Cool Cats 4 challenge and some of the potential outcomes we may see from it.
Post Challenge Projection
This is always a hot topic right when a challenge gets announced, and the thing I get the most messages about in Twitter and Discord. I will share with you my current chart, and then talk through some of the ways I think my projections are different than others you may be seeing around the industry.
Reminder: these projections update every 4-6 hours in the Google Sheet Tools.
When I put together my CC3 projections, I made the mistake of comparing each Cool Cat to their respective common moments and building from there. Unfortunately, I was $140 off and more than 90% of that was due to bad Cool Cats numbers. By comparing only to the player’s common moments, I failed to account for the added utility that all of the Cool Cats would retain after the challenge ended due to the Cool Cats Master Challenge.
This time around I have more appropriately based my post-challenge guess off of previous Cool Cats. In turn, these may look a bit higher than some others you see, but they should continue to ebb and flow with the balance of the Cool Cats set next week. Let’s move on to some bigger and better things!
Too Cool to do this a 4th Time?
One of the more important things to talk through is the projected completion numbers for CC4. There are a few things to consider here.
This time around it’s a 7-day timer which is the shortest of any Cool Cats.
It is going to be the cheapest Cool Cats challenge we have seen yet. Maybe…
It is the “only show in town” right now for common moments.
All three of these things seem to balance each other out well, so I am expecting that the Westbrook mint count will be similar to that of Jokic and AD (7k range). Plus we all know how much I love a good buzzer beater!
Where it gets interesting is when we look at the the population of people who have completed the Master Challenge. I will save you a screenshot of another super complicated spreadsheet (it’s available on the Google Tools for you data nerds), but what it shows is the vast majority of CCM collectors are anchored around the CC2 set. From there its a pretty even split on people who have completed CC2 + CC1 or CC3 and are then working on the other one they haven;t completed. Since a lot of people on the way to completing the master have not yet finished all 3 previous ones, this may lead to even less of them completing CC4. Taking the wait and buy later approach.
Since the CC3 cats have been pretty easy to get post-challenge, a lot of people may decide to do the same for CC4. However, if the number of people with this mindset gets too high, that means the Westbrook reward may end up being out of 5k or less rather than 7k. This in turn, would make the CC4 challenge even more enticing to complete because the Westbrook moment would be more rare than the Jokic or AD. It will be fun to watch this unfold over the next few days. There will be a tipping point, and I will do my best to keep my finger on the pulse.
CC4 is going to cost less than CC3…right?!
As of now this answer is yes. Almost 2k people have completed the challenge for right around $400. Most of the 15k serial CC3 cats hovered around the $80 range for most of that challenge so we would expect the 20k CC4 cats should stay below this mark. Right?!
It’s important to remember that Dwight Howard and Serge Ibaka make this a 15k challenge as well. So while the CC4 cats won’t creep up to match the CC3s, I still think Howard and Serge have some room to run up. Right now, both players are hovering in the mid-to-high $50s, but we need to consider who owns these moments. Likely if they have been holding on to either of these 15k moments, they believe in the players long-term or they just aren’t very active on TS. If they were owned by more “active” members of the community, we would have seen a lot more of them be de-listed right before the marketplace opened back up. That didn’t happen and Ibaka still sold for $9 and Dwight for $19 right away.
If Dwight and Serge approach the $80-$100 range like the CC3 commons did, this challenge could get a bit more interesting. Enter Jerami Grant!
As you can see from the chart above, Grant has the least amount of listings on Top Shot of all the current Cool Cats 4 moments. Compared to the other 35k moments (Montrezl Harrell & Steven Adams), Grant has 3k less moments in circulation right now. He is trending closer to a 18k mint count. That’s cool Jon, but Top Shot could come out with more packs before the challenge is over!
We know of a Release 27 that has yet to hit the market. Using the Circulating Counts tool, we can see that there are 2444 Harrells, 2444 Adams, and ZERO Grants scheduled to come out in that drop. That’s right ZERO! Unless you think TS is going to squeeze out two quick base pack drops in the next 6 days, it’s pretty safe to assume Grant is going to stay where he’s at.
Due to the amount of listings on the MP and the number of people that still need Grant, he currently has the same “squeeze” potential as Howard and Ibaka, which means that he is probably underpriced. If he does get squeezed (remember AD at the end of the Seeing Stars 2 challenge), that could make the CC4 pretty comparable to the CC3 price point. I’ve already bought some Jerami Grants because of this data, and I may go grab a few more tonight!
So Should I Complete the Cool Cats 4 Challenge?
This is a surefire way to not get a response from me in my DMs. Like with anything I will say that it makes sense to track these kind of metrics for the next few days and see if completing a challenge fits into your investment goals. Although I will say, if Westbrook is somehow teetering around a 4k serial come Monday night, it may signal a time to pony up and go for it!
Quick housekeeping: I am MOVING this weekend. Very fun, very stressful, probably not a lot of time for Top Shot. I will update the sheets once or twice through the weekend. Apologies in advance if something crazy happens.
35k Moments going LE? Besides the traded players, I have no idea who it’s going to be. By the time you read this they may have already announced it. There will surely be some buying action on whatever moments get closed off, so make sure you list some of your not-so-favorite 35k moments now so you have a chance at waking up to a red notification bell.
Suggestions/Ideas/Crticism? - I want to hear it. I am going to start including this button on the bottom of every post. Ultimately my goal is to help keep you all informed, so you can help me by giving me ideas about what you want to learn!
Good stuff Jon! Also noticed the listings on Grant were suspiciously low yesterday morning so snatched up a few - but clearly not enough! Curious on where you pulled the data for the contents of Release 27 in terms of there being zero Grants in there. Currently on OTM I’m seeing 3629 as being in a pack - if that data is accurate is there a way to determine the breakdown between unopened packs that people currently own versus unsold packs? Thanks!
all the dots connect, thank you.