This Week on NBA Top Shot: Buying Packs with Trade Tickets
by Chris Otis
3/7/2022
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 essential NBA Top Shot news and updates over the last week. 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 all of the latest Top Shot news and updates here every week. This past week started out rough but closed on a high note, so let’s recap what went down!
tl;dr: This Week on NBA Top Shot
It’s been a rough few weeks for NBA Top Shot. The experimental new pack drop system sputtered from the start and never really regained the community’s trust, the NFL All Day and UFC Strike marketplaces opened and seem to have taken a substantial amount of money out of the Top Shot ecosystem, and intrusive maintenance periods killed momentum at key junctures.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my year of collecting Top Shot Moments, it’s that these down periods don’t typically last for long, and it just takes one change to start a positive shift.
With the market down and community morale arguably the lowest its been in months, Dapper Labs CEO Roham Gharegozlou fired off the above tweet, promptly setting the Top Shot community on fire with speculation and debate.
Most of the conversation centered around whether or not burning Moments would (or should) become a thing, but it turns out we should have set our sights on a feature that’s already part of the Top Shot universe: Trade Tickets.
Finally, after a couple delays, the news broke that roughly half of the packs for sale in the next drop, which will occur on Wednesday and Thursday — pending the result of Tuesday’s Stress Tests — will be available to purchase with Trade Tickets.
This marks the first time that packs other than Locker Room Packs or Series 1 Reserve Packs are able to be purchased with Trade Tickets, hinting towards a future where Trade Tickets offer much more utility and a legitimate supply-reduction mechanism.
This news was welcomed by the overwhelming majority of the community as a step in the right direction, so let’s see how the market has reacted so far.
Top Shot Market Update
It’s no secret that the market hasn’t been in a great place recently, but could the Trade Ticket news change that? Let’s take a look at the marketplace metrics and find out.
Top Shot Marketplace Metrics
Both the MR100 and Total Market Cap continue to stagnate and slowly drop, though the Total Market Cap has been showing signs of life over the past 24 hours. With these sort of big-picture metrics, it usually takes some time before the effects of any big news or announcement become noticeable, so let’s wait to see how the drops this week impact these values.
With the 24-hour metrics, the effects of Friday’s announcement are much clearer, especially in the Transactions metric where a very obvious spike can be seen at the end of the week.
A couple interesting observations can be made, however. First, in the 24-hour Sales Volume metric, the spike at the end of the week is far less pronounced, which makes sense as most of the Moments being bought for Trade Tickets would be in the $1 to $3 range.
Secondly, there have been far more sellers than buyers over the past couple of days, indicating that the number of users trying to collect Moments to turn into Trade Tickets from the marketplace is much lower than the number of users who have been content to let $2 and $3 listings sit in the marketplace instead of turning them into Trade Tickets.
Biggest Top Shot Sales
Kevin Durant continued dominating our Biggest Sales of the Week list, though none of his Series 1 Run It Back Moments made the list for the first time in quite awhile. Instead, two KD Series 2 Holo Icons sold for $11,500 and $10,999, respectively.
The top sale of the week belonged to Top Shot user Cuteknick, who has made this list more than once in the past, with his $18,999 purchase of a Steph Curry Series 1 From the Top Legendary Moment dwarfing the rest of the week’s purchases by a wide margin.
Top Shot Pack Drops This Week
After last week’s pack drop frenzy, this week was originally supposed to see the fourth and final release of All-Star Game Packs, but after that was delayed to next week, the only drop that occurred was Batch 4 of the Series 1 Reserve Packs.
Series 1 Reserve Packs (Batch 4)
Batch 4 of the Series 1 Reserve Moments was dropped on February 28, with 500 packs available for purchase for the standard cost of 350 Trade Tickets.
The full list of Moments included in the drop can be found here, but some highlights include the Top Shot Debuts of LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo, among others.
This Week in Top Shot Challenges
After weeks of unrelenting barrages of Showcase Challenges, this past week actually made for a bit of a break due to the delayed All-Star Game Pack drop. No new Traditional Showcase Challenges went live, but Top Shot still kept things interesting with a few Flash Challenges spread throughout the week.
Top Shot Traditional Challenges
While no new Traditional Showcase Challenges occurred this week, next week’s drop will see the start of three new Challenges for the Fresh Threads, 2022 All-Star Game, and Holo Icon sets. The rewards will be: CJ McCollum for Fresh Threads, Steph Curry for 2022 All-Star Game, and Anthony Davis for Holo Icon.
Top Shot Flash Challenges
Regarding Flash Challenges, the week started out hot with three consecutive days of Flash Challenges: Lucky 7 on Monday, Starting Five on Tuesday, and Take 5 on Wednesday. Rewards varied from Series 2 Base Set packs to MSFE Moments of Brandon Ingram and Kyle Kuzma.
The week closed out with Doubles, which ran through the weekend and offered collectors a chance at a Bam Adebayo MSFE Moment.
Miscellaneous Top Shot Updates
- Top Shot will now display the number of each Moment stored in The Locker Room in each Moment’s NFT Details graphic. Reminder: Moments in The Locker Room have been traded in for Trade Tickets.
- Top Shot has launched a community survey to get feedback on some key features.
- This blog further explains the Trade Tickets feature as far as it pertains to current and upcoming drops.
- NBA Top Shot released a new and improved packs page.
- MomentRanks released Groups for your Top Shot collection. You can now organize your collection intro groups by sets, player, team, and more on your Top Shot profile page and see the valuation of that group.
- Across the Dapperverse, NFL All Day dropped its Week 17 Replay Packs last week, with more packs likely coming in the near future.
The Week Ahead on Top Shot
This coming week will be all about the final release of the All-Star Game packs and purchasing packs with Trade Tickets, with Stress Test packs kicking things off this Tuesday.
Assuming things go well with the Stress Tests, Wednesday will see two separate Elite Pack drops, with the first being for the Trade Ticket purchases and the second for the typical $49 purchases. Then, on Thursday, the Standard Packs will be dropped featuring the same two-queue model.
Once the drops have been completed, three all-new Showcase Challenges will go live as mentioned above, featuring rewards from the Fresh Threads, 2022 All-Star Game, and Holo Icon sets.
And, as usual, be on the lookout every day for new Flash Challenges, which figure to continue being a massive part of the daily collector experience for the foreseeable future.
That’s all for this week everyone, thanks for reading and I’ll see you all back here next Monday!