This week’s edition of Talkin’ Top Shot is written by Ryan Knaus, not your usual author Jared Johnson. As such, my quixotic pursuit of low-mint Series 1 Moments will replace Jared’s nuanced Top Shot insights and strategies. But fear not – this is a one-week-only change and Jared will be back on March 18. Without further ado, here is my guest perspective.
It was time to prune my Top Shot collection, overgrown as it was with an assortment of Moments from Series 2 and 3. The majority of my Moments from Series 3 were what most collectors would call ‘garbage’. I don’t particularly need to commemorate Kentavious Caldwell-Pope hitting a tough 3-pointer from a game I don’t remember on Dec. 18 vs. Utah. I could wait for Flash Challenges to boost my triplicate S3 Common Ty Jerome moments by a few bucks, an innovation that has added a lot of depth and utility to Moments (as detailed in Jared’s column from Jan. 21). However, I’m not plugged-in enough to capitalize on daily fluctuations in value, let alone hourly.
Trade Ticket system explained
Fortunately, Top Shot’s ecosystem has a clever trick to help collectors dispose of garbage Moments (or as Top Shot puts it, "[Moments] that just don’t float your boat”) without the hassle and transaction fees of listing them for sale. You can simply click a few buttons to forfeit your Moment in exchange for a ‘Trade Ticket’.
You can’t sell Trade Tickets, so any value they have derives from the ability to exchange them for packs. They’ve been used as both the drop requirement (e.g., must have 350 tickets) and the actual ‘price’ of packs (e.g., packs cost 25 tickets). Top Shot’s Community Lead, Jacob Eisenberg, said in last week’s interview that more functionalities will be added over time. “I think the Trade Ticket system is very much in the top of the first inning,” he said. “We’re very excited about all the different things we can do.”
The typical, always-available option is to exchange four tickets for a Locker pack with three random Moments which collectors have traded in – currently, all Locker pack Moments are from Series 2 or 3. The allure is that you can ditch your worst Moments and perhaps acquire some that are better…albeit at a rather steep 4-to-3 exchange rate. I did that a few times and got a couple Series 2 Moments that made it a marginal gain, but it’s not a path to prosperity or a sustainable way to build a collection – it’s primary appeal is convenience.
Top Shot recently introduced All-Star packs available for trade tickets, but the truly valuable packs are those with Series 1 Reserve Moments. The catch is that they cost somewhere in the lofty range of 300-500 tickets per pack (the most recent S1 Reserve packs required 350 tickets). That’s a decidedly inconvenient number to obtain. But I’d been meaning to winnow down my collection, and melting dozens of lesser Moments into a handful of valuable S1 Moments felt right -- a LeBron S1 Common has a low ask of $630. I decided to go for it.
Acquiring Trade Tickets – simple but tedious
The process of acquiring a Trade Ticket is simple. But it is also a bit clunky and, when done in sufficient quantities, tedious. For now, let’s assume you’ve set up a brand new, empty Top Shot account and navigated to the Marketplace. To obtain a ticket at the lowest cost, your steps are to 1) Click to sort by price (low to high, naturally), 2) Click to select a moment, 3) Click ‘Select and Buy’, 4) Click to select a specific Serial # Moment for sale, 5) Click ‘Buy for $2', 6) Click ‘Pay with...’ once re-directed to Dapper, 7) Click on your Collection, 8) Click on the Moment you want to exchange, 9) Click ‘Exchange for 1 Trade Ticket’, 10) Click ‘Confirm’ once re-directed to Dapper.
Congratulations, you have a shiny new Trade Ticket. Now do that again 349 more times, for an absolute minimum of 3,500 clicks (many with long pauses in between). This is best accomplished as a background activity – I’ve trudged toward 350 tickets on my phone at idle moments, on my laptop while watching a TV show, and in background tabs while writing this very column. The process would be instantly streamlined if Top Shot allowed users to buy Moments in bulk and convert them to Tickets in bulk, but that’s a topic for another column. It helps that most collectors already own a ton of garbage Moments they don’t mind exchanging. If a Moment is already in your collection, then only takes four clicks to exchange for a Ticket. My most disposable Moments took me up to about 50 Tickets. Then I started selling off every non-WNBA Moment I had, even though I was taking losses since the market has plummeted in recent weeks.
When scouring Top Shot for the cheapest possible Moments to turn into Tickets, it’s immediately clear that Series 3 commons are the target. Players whose 60k+ mint commons are perpetually available for $2 include Eric Gordon, Onyeka Okongwu, David Nwaba, Malik Beasley, Hamidou Diallo and Facundo Campazzo.
However, it isn’t only second- and third-tier players who are available for $2. I scooped up rock-bottom Moments for Anthony Davis, Rudy Gobert, Jayson Tatum, Pascal Siakam and other All-Stars along the way, only to immediately turn them into Trade Tickets. It didn’t feel right to value Tatum the same as Nwaba, but such is life in Top Shot’s ecosystem.
$1 Moments – good luck
There are Moments listed at the $1 mark, but they are fleeting. You can refresh the page, instantly click to the ‘Buy’ button on any given $1 Moment, and yet there will be a 95% chance it’s unavailable or your purchase fails. Is that partly due to bots, which Top Shot has historically done well to combat? Or is it simple odds? How many simultaneous active buyers would be required to make it nearly impossible for an individual (me) to acquire any given $1 Moment from 2-3am ET on a Thursday? Here’s an example:
As I write this, Georges Niang‘s S3 common Moment has an average sale price of $1.65 over the past 14 days. That means that a generous portion of his Moments are switching hands for $1, yet none of them came to me despite a lengthy, concerted effort. Maybe it’s a simple question of internet speed. I don’t have the absolute fastest internet, and I’m on Wi-Fi instead of hardwired, but 300 Mbps should be sufficient to occasionally out-click competitors. I was literally just sitting on Niang’s page, waiting for $1 Moments to appear, and repeatedly failing to get them. Maybe you’ll have better luck, but I don’t plan to waste my time pursuing $1 Moments.
If you can get them, I should note, it seems like an obvious buy. Top Shot doesn’t allow fractions of a dollar in sales, and they can’t be sold for zero. The only danger is that the $1 Moments never develop re-sale appeal and languish at $1 for eternity (especially high serial #s), and even if you do sell them, you must subtract Top Shot’s 5% transaction fee. But if you can flip them for $2 and do that in volume, you’re making a killing at 95% profit. Hence the pernicious appeal of bots, I suppose. (Note: I did get pop-ups warning that I could only buy 1 Moment every 1 Minute, but it didn’t seem to prevent me from doing just that.)
A brief aside: Trade Tickets’ supply-pruning function
I referred earlier to Trade Tickets as “a clever system” for customers to dispense with unwanted Moments. It is also a clever fix for Top Shot, as it turns Series 1 reserve packs into incentivizing carrots for collectors to chase while vacuuming up the least-desirable Moments. Once turned over to Top Shot, they are owned by the ‘Vault’ and potentially out of circulation – with a 4-to-3 ratio for trade-ins, the process ensures a 25% decrease in the supply of available Moments. (Update: In last week’s interview, Jacob said this exact thing.) Top Shot can flood the market with pack sales, then bail out some of the water with Trade Ticket incentives. A neat trick, though it hasn’t been enough to make a big dent in overall supply – after all, I was still getting $1 and $2 Moments with ease right up until they locked Trade Tickets about 24 hours prior to the Feb. 28 drop of S1 Reserve. Nor have they cleaned up a large fraction of Moments in circulation – at a cost of 350 Trade Tickets, with 500 packs available, the entire Feb. 28 drop cleaned up 175,000 Moments. For perspective, the All-Star Standard Pack from Feb. 24 added 880,000 Moments to the marketplace.
How to get to 300+ Trade Tickets?
I can think of a few paths to 300+ Trade Tickets.
1. Grinding. In as much as Top Shot is a game, as it is with paths to rewards, collector scores, badges, set bonuses, etc., then obtaining 300+ Trade Tickets is the ‘grind’ feature of the game. If you’re starting out with under 100 tickets, then buying then one by one on the marketplace will be a serious grind. I started out with about 50.
2. Going off-Marketplace. There are sub-Reddits and sites like MomentRanks and LiveToken and others which have hardcore communities of Top Shot collectors. There might be a way to arrange a bulk purchase of cheap Moments, for instance taking 40 garbage Moments off someone’s hands for $1.80/each. Fair to both parties and saves a lot of time. There might be people selling entire accounts on eBay? This route will inevitably require creativity and risk.
3. Being a power-user. If you’re already maxing out pack purchases and attending every drop, while also stockpiling cheap Moments when you see them, you could have hundreds of viable Moments already. I have no feel for the average Top Shot collector’s readily-available stockpile.
If you have any clever strategies here (or related to anything in this column), drop me a line on Twitter @ryanknaus.
Series 1 pack drop experience - womp womp
After sufficient grinding, it was Seth Curry who clinched it for me, giving me an even 350 Tickets and a green light to pursue the Series 1 Reserve Pack. All it meant was that I’d qualify for the queue, but I still needed a top-500 spot in line to guarantee I’d score a pack. The moment arrived. The page refreshed, and my queue number was: 765. I kept the tab open just in case, but predictably few people seemed to drop off the queue and it closed well short of my spot. That left me with no Series 1 Reserve pack, no cash in my account, very few Moments in my collection, a whole lot of Trade Tickets, and the following question…
Do Trade Ticket drop requirements sideline cash?
I don’t know how many people qualified and attended the S1 Reserve drop. It may have been in the thousands, or maybe my position at #765 was near the upper limit. In any case, an absolute minimum of 265 collectors were left with 350+ trade tickets in their accounts after the drop. If we’re being realistic, those committed collectors are not burning them on low-end Locker packs. At the time, the only alternative was to wait many weeks for the next S1 Reserve drop and hope to get a low enough queue spot. That would have left a bare minimum of 265 collectors (and likely many, many more) with around $700 frozen as Trade Tickets; tickets which were essentially illiquid until the next S1 Reserve drop.
But with an absolute minimum of 265 collectors already at 350+ tickets, the requirements for entry would (presumably) need to be raised even higher for the next S1 Reserve packs. If they were to raise it to 400 tickets, that’d be another $100 which I (and many others) would plow into Trade Tickets and another queue-lottery gamble. If it goes as high as 500 tickets (which was the ceiling in their initial roadmap announcement), that’s another $300 invested. That means a whole lot of collectors would have $1,000 invested into Top Shot, almost none of which would be actively circulating in the marketplace – that money would be sidelined in pursuit of S1 Moments (which at current prices would, I believe, offer negative Expected Value). For a fishbowl economy with complex supply and demand imbalances, that’s only likely to exacerbate problems.
Real-time innovation
I’ve tweaked the preceding paragraphs slightly to reflect a conditional past tense, because Top Shot (as is their M.O.) seems to have invented a real-time solution to a problem (too many collectors with too many Trade Tickets) caused by a previous solution (cleaning up garbage Moments by incentivizing the hoarding of hundreds of Trade Tickets) to a problem (too many garbage Moments) caused by a previous solution (make Moments and pack rips more accessible) to a problem (how to grow users and improve user experience when packs are scarce) caused by a solution (using scarcity to establish value and cachet) to a problem (how to establish value and cachet)...well, you get the idea.
In any case, the solution seems to have been: Entice collectors to burn off Trade Tickets by making them the exclusive currency of ‘Standard’ and ‘Elite’ drops. For example:
- Elite Packs
- When: Mar. 9
- Volume: 18,920 packs
- Contents: Five Moments (four S3 base set, 1 Common LE, Rare, or Legendary)
- Cost: 25 Trade Tickets
- Requirements: Drop Score of 4000+
The Elite drop above, and the related ‘Standard’ drop, should have cleared up to 759,000 Trade Tickets off the books. They simultaneously added more supply (207,000 Moments) to the marketplace, but at least those are more liquid and will move around with a price attached to them. If you use the Marketplace, that is fantastic news. There was zero collector score requirement for the ‘Standard’ drop, but I opted to pass – I want scarce Series 1 Moments, one of which will be numbered to 1,000. I don’t want a lottery ball for anything from Series 3.
Scoring an ‘Elite’ pack was impossible because of the requirement: 4,000+ collector score, with more packs available to those with even higher scores. Having ignored Jared’s expert advice on building collector score through Team Sets and other means, I was hovering around 2,000 and wouldn’t have qualified anyway. But because I’ve melted down my modest collection to obtain Trade Tickets, my collector score has bottomed out – I’m at 546 and falling every time I sell another Moment to get more tickets. That 546 score won’t improve much when I do eventually get my Series 1 Reserve, with a likely total around 150-200 CS per pack.
That’s been my perspective on hoarding hundreds and hundreds of Trade Tickets. I’m user Detleftbehind on Top Shot, if you care to gawk at my decimated collection of Moments and mountain of really cool tickets. Thanks for reading, and good luck with your Top Shot collecting, no matter what approach you take to it.
