Collector Score Bonuses and Bottleneck Boys

How the biggest shakeup to pack requirements impacts Top Shot

Yesterday afternoon Top Shot dropped its most information-packed update of all-time, informing us about the upcoming Holo Icon drop, its associated Collector Score requirements, and new Bonuses. While the announcement was arguably overwhelming at first, we can call a quick 20-second timeout to get up to speed on the fundamentals and dive deeper into the interesting aspects of the new team-based Bonuses.

The Basics

For starters, the upcoming Legendary Holo Icon drop requires a Collector Score of 7,500 - a value not for the faint of heart or shallow-of-pockets. Additionally, the Holo Icon pack will be sold at a significantly reduced price of $230. For context, the cheapest Series 2 Holo Icon Moments are currently selling on the Marketplace for just under $1,000, so it’s safe to say this pack will be tremendously +EV.

For those getting back into the swing of things, each Moment has a designated number of Collector Score points, primarily driven by its Series and Rarity. The more rare, or the earlier the Series, the more points. While the 7,500 Collector Score may seem unattainable to some, Top Shot also announced multiple ways you can boost Moments’ Collector Score points:

• Set Completion (+100% Bonus): Complete a set

• Series Team Completion (+50% Bonus): Collect at least one Moment from each player on a team of your choice for a given series

• Full Team Completion (+150% Bonus): Collect at least one Moment from each player ever to be featured on a team of your choice

It’s worth pointing out that if you’re able to obtain a Full Team Completion, you’ll also obtain a Series Team Completion - resulting in a +200% boost or a 3x multiplier! For folks like myself, this is a really enticing way to stretch your Collector Score points and become eligible for the Holo Icon pack. Let’s dive into the Full Team Completion and better understand which teams are more attainable than others.

Full Team Completion

Like any good Data Scientist, my first step after reading about these Bonuses was to determine the most cost effective way for me (and you all) to boost Collector Scores. While each collector will be in a unique situation, we can start by understanding the baseline cost to purchase a Moment from each player ever to be featured on a given team. To do this, all we have to do is find the unique players to have a Top Shot Moment for each team, and then find the cheapest Moment for each player. Here’s what we find:

As we can see, the price to earn this bonus for each time varies drastically, primarily driven by one or two scarce Moments for a given team. The Hornets and Timberwolves are certainly the most accessible teams to complete, as all of the unique players from these teams have a Series 2 Moment that is considerably more affordable than the rest.

On the other side of the spectrum we have teams that include a player with only a Run It Back Moment, resulting in a very high price tag. Want to earn the OKC Thunder Full Team Bonus? Better have a Kevin Durant Run It Back Moment! (ouch)

Lastly we have a slightly more challenging set of teams that require at least one player whose most affordable Moment is from Series 1, and these are colored in purple. These have proven to be the most interesting to analyze as they are attainable from a price perspective, but are subject to bottlenecks with the required Series 1 Moments. Let’s take the Utah Jazz as an example:

There are 9 unique Jazz players on Top Shot, 8 of which have a Series 2 Moment. For Jarrell Brantley, a power forward who only played 28 games for the Jazz this season, his only Moment is from Series 1, and it has a low circulation count of 1,500. That, my friends, is a bottleneck.

Bottleneck Boys

Taking a look at the teams highlighted in purple above, we can identify all of the Full Team Bonus bottlenecks - players who only have a Series 1 Moment for a team that is otherwise affordable, and doesn’t include a Run It Back Moment. Here’s the full list:

• Jazz: Jarrell Brantley

• Pelicans: Jrue Holiday

• Bucks: Eric Bledsoe, George Hill

• Nuggets: Torrey Craig, Jerami Grant

• Raptors: Serge Ibaka, Norman Powell

• Rockets: Austin Rivers, James Harden

As the Top Shot announcement made ripples through Twitter and inboxes around the globe, these Moments skyrocketed in value. For example, our friend Jarrell Brantley’s 15k LE Moment shot from $40 to over $215 in a matter of hours.

As someone frantically trying to comprehend the latest Top Shot announcement, it took me a solid hour to fully grasp how the bonuses worked, and what my strategy should be. Curious enough, I wanted to look back and see how quickly other collectors were able to jump on these bottleneck Moments. Here’s what I found:

In the first hour after the Top Shot announcement, 83 accounts purchased 149 of these bottleneck Moments. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of these accounts purchased one or two bottleneck Moments, likely completing the Full Team Bonus early before prices skyrocketed. What really surprised me was when I looked at the top of our bottleneck buying leaderboard and saw that OwnTheMoment had purchased a whopping 23 bottleneck Moments - the most of all collectors over the first hour.

At first I could only tip my hat to the OwnTheMoment crew - they quickly parsed the announcement, identified these bottleneck Moments, and made some smart investments. But then I noticed that the Own The Moment team recorded a podcast with Top Shot Community Manager, Jacob Eisenberg, earlier that day, highlighting the fact that they were privy to the Collector Score requirements and new Bonuses before the rest of the community. While the crew did wait until after the announcement to start purchasing these bottleneck Moments, it without a doubt rubbed me the wrong way for two main reasons:

First, while not acting in the Marketplace with this insider information before the announcement was made, and embargo was likely lifted, a hand-picked set of collectors had access to valuable information hours ahead of time. This head start clearly gave an advantage for some to determine the bottlenecks far before your average collector.

Secondly, it frustrates me to see a Top Shot Community staple - one that aims to help and support Collectors - actively engage in the Marketplace in a way that is clearly financially advantageous. While these Moments have not been flipped, they’ve also taken away from the available supply and made things more challenging for collectors at large. This comes off the tailwinds of a recent fundraising announcement that highlights investments from some of the biggest players in Top Shot, as well as Dapper Labs, themselves. Perhaps these bottleneck Moments will be gifted away to the Community, or there are other plans, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Final Thoughts

There’s certainly a lot to unpack from these recent announcements, but there’s one aspect that stands out to me: there are now many ways to play the game. With different bonuses for collecting Moments from a team, completing a particular set, etc., there are now many strategies at play, and I believe this will result in a more dynamic and interesting community. While you may not care for a Bryn Forbes Top Shot debut - it might be the magic key that unlocks me becoming eligible for a Legendary pack drop!

That’s all for this week! As always, I hope you enjoyed this article. Want to support the newsletter? The best way you can help out is by sharing it with a friend.

Disclaimer: None of the above constitutes professional and/or financial advice. All opinions expressed on Minted Moment are from the personal research and experience of author, and are intended for educational purposes only.