NBA TopShots, Throwdowns Drop
May 10th, 2021 the Series 2 Rare Throwdown Collection dropped on NBA TopShots. I was excited as it would be my first opportunity to buy a rare pack for the bargain price of $149. Up until this point every pack drop on TopShots showed an immediate +EV return for anyone who wanted to flip the cards in the pack. So for $149 I expecting to flip my first rare moment for $200 or more and get 5 bonus base moments for free.
I became eligible the day before as I had just increased my total number of moments to 20. I was my intention to stay above the 15 moment threshold for buying a rare pack. When my collection was snapshot the next day, they increased the minimum number for eligibility to 18, without warning. My collector score was 240 and the new minimum was 220. I was grateful to make the cut.
I opened my pack with hopes of seeing a Zion, Edwards, or Kawhi. I was slightly disappointed to see the Spurs logo for my first rare pull and Keldon Johnson. He is an average player on an average team, but it is a nice 3 point fake with a big finish. I was still hopeful it would be a profitable investment.
As soon as the market opened, I was disappointed again to see most of the listing go off in the $120-$180 range. I set my flip for $139. In only a few minutes I realized there were no buyers at this level so I lowered it to $119. A few minutes later I lowered it again to $99 now in a bit of a panic. I watched in a bit of horror as the price fell to $65. Over the course of the next hour, it did manage to climb back to $90, and as I went to bed I was confident it would sell overnight.
When I checked again in the morning, it had fallen to $75. It had been my plan to flip the card from the beginning, so I set the sell order in at $75, and a few minutes later it sold. I then went about selling my five common moments that I pulled. There was nothing exciting in the pack and I manage to get $25 for the rest.
In all, I flipped my pack for $100, minus $5 commissions for a total loss of $54. Not very good for my first venture into the rare market.
Let’s take a look at where the price of the moments are two days after the release and see if my expectation was justified.
It seemed to be a good decision to sell the moment when I did because the next day it is now down to $62. The entire market is in a complete free fall at the moment so it would not surprise me to see it go much lower than that.
But let’s take a look at the averages. right now the average low ask of all the cards is $87. Let’s assume you could also sell the remaining common moments for $30. We are looking at an average loss for flippers of about $38 after commissions on an $149 investment. That’s not very good.
The median loss will be higher for than this as well, as most moments sell for less than the average. To my knowledge it is the only TopShot drop to date to show -EV return for flippers. Looking back, the pack does look good with only 1800 in an issue. The problem I believe that was overlooked by myself and many others was the large number of moments available, 45. The pack would have been much more valuable with a number of moments in the 16–20 range. In that case, there would have been fewer disappointed collectors.
So unless you were lucky enough to pull one of the Westbrook, Morant, Zion, Edwards, or a low serial number moment, you surely lost money on your investment.
Will these losses deter myself and other collectors from buying packs in the future? I can assure you, it will not on both accounts. But what it will do is make people to take a closer look into what is being offered on the pack before just blindly throwing down the money.
The market is low right now so I wanted to make sure I had Dapper on hand so I can buy undervalued moments. I my next blog, I will detail where I allocated the proceeds.
Game on.
Originally published at https://thepokernomad.com.