This is the second version of my portfolio manage series on NBA Top Shot. As Top Shot continues to evolve and morph into a more mature platform, it becomes essential to stay up to date on trends and new developments on the platform to maximize both your collector experience and potential profits. Lets’s look at some of the changes that have occurs since I first wrote on this topic.

Pack Drops

New pack drops continue to be the most positive expected value activity on the site. In fact, it is becoming increasingly so. What we have seen is a drastic reduction in the prices of the packs, particularly in the rare and legendary drops. Legendary packs that use to routinely cost $999, now go most recently for $230 for the same types of packs. Rare packs that use go to come off the shelf for $150 – $250, have gone for as little as $24 to most recently $79. Even the common playoff pack for $14 is a steal and can be virtually guaranteed to show a profit.

The difficulty now becomes actually getting your hands on one of these packs. The queues for these drops have become several multiples higher than the supply. This has forced Top Shot to come up with a fair and creative way to allocate who is allowed to purchase the packs.

Collector Scores

Everyone who is on Top Shot should be familiar with what their collector score is by now. If it is your goal to grow your collection, you should take measures to increase your score intelligently.

Top Shot has recently made improvements to the their queuing system that reward collector with big scores and still provides lottery type opportunities for collectors with small accounts. For the Metallic Gold drop in June, the collector score minimum requirement was 2,500. At the time I was able to maneuver my account to hit this number, although I was not fortunate enough to get a pack.

The upcoming rare drop for the Then There Was Four set, requires a collector score of 5,000 just for the priority 2 queue which gives collectors roughly a 1 in 14 chance of picking up a pack. Once again I was able to increase my score to hit this number and I will describe below the best way to do this.

The priority 1 queue offers collectors roughly a 1 in 3 in picking up a pack and requires a collector score of 10,000. I was not able to hit this number this time around but I will make it a goal of mine to do so in the future. It would require another cash deposit for me to get there but I will eventually do it.

The priority 3 queue should be available to most everyone and require a score of just 100, which should be able to be done with an initial deposit of as little as $20. This comes with it roughly a 1 in 100 chance of picking up a rare pack but remember the pack itself will cost you $79.

Originally I did own the Hustle & Show complete set that allowed me to hit the first 2,500 goal. Right now you can pick up this 18 moment set for roughly $400. The two bottlenecks are the Giannis and Morant challenge challenge rewards but it offers a collector score of 840. This is PC (Price Cost) ratio of over 2.1:1. This is good but after doing the calculations, I realized there were better ways to increase my score. I therefore liquidated that set in favour of my new strategy.

Stacking large numbers of base Series 2 moments for $3 or $4 a piece actually provides a best PC ratio because of the 12 collector points that each provide. The problem with this is you are forced to hold potentially hundreds of moments of players you my not even particularly like. For me, this was not something I wanted to do.

Team Bonuses

The best and most cost effective way to hit these numbers is to collect the team bonus. This will provide you with up to a 300% bonus on each moment you own for your favourite team. This will grow your collector score faster than any other method on currently available on Top Shot.

After liquidating my Hustle & Show set, I had the dapper available to pick up the Toronto Raptor‘s team set. This cost was a similar amount of about $400. The two bottle necks were the Norman Powell and Serge Ibaka series 1 moments which cost about $300 for both. Doing this has set me up hit the priority 1 queues in the future as it provides a 300% bonus on moment scores.

I have begun to stack cheap moments from Kyle Lowry and Pascal Siakam that now give me 36 points instead of 12 for $4. My Hustle & Show moment for OG Anunoby now offers a score of 60 points instead of and sells for $10. I also picked up a rare moment from Chris Boucher in the Throwdown set which gave me a big 240 points from just a single card for only $45. I ultimately have my eye on a legendary Fred Vanvleet which is currently going for $800, but would give me a crazy 3,000 collector points in return. This strategy to me, clearly represent the easiest and most cost efficient way to grow your collector score to higher priority queues.

Now obviously some off these numbers will vary greatly depending on which team is your favourite. At the time I wrote this, Minnesota and Charlotte are the two cheapest team sets to collect. I considered this briefly, but ultimately this Top Shot experience is suppose to be fun, and holding 20 Terry Rozier’s or Ricky Rubio’s moments in my account did not sound like fun to me.

There are a few team bonus’ that will be prohibitive due to expensive bottlenecks. The ‘Run IT Back Series 1‘ set has made several of the team bonuses out of reach for most collectors. Dirk Nowitski, Steve Nash, and Kevin Garnett are just a couple of examples of several players from this set that have ruined team bonuses for many fans as each of these moments cost several thousands of dollars each. Fair or not, all I can do is offer condolences if your favourite team has such a bottleneck.

If this includes your favourite team, what I would recommend is rather forking out thousands of dollars for one Run it Back moment, instead look to pick up the complete Cool Cats set for roughly $3,000 which Top Shot has pretty said will put you in the top tier of all packs drops in the future. Picking up the complete Playoff 2021 set should also put you close to meeting this goal as well and may be slightly cheaper than the Cool Cat set.

A series 2 Run it Back set is expected for release later this summer. I do fully expect to have to pick up either a Vince Cater or Kawhi Leonard in a Raptor uniform. Hopefully the cost will not force me to once again create a new strategy just to keep up my score.

Asset Allocation

So with this in mind, I have come up with a new allocation to both maximum my collector experience and for sound money management. This is what I have now set my account at;

50% – High PC ratio moments – this will of course include all My Raptor moments and should make up the majority of the collector points required to hit the higher queues.

25% – Long term hold moments – I want to have a small basket of moments that I want to hold for the long term growth but do not play the Raptors. The moments I am currently collecting are some of the challenge rewards from the 2021 Playoff set. They seem severely underpriced to me at the moment and also have the bonus of being historically significant.

25% – Short term hold moments & Dapper – I am currently in several of the cheaper 2021 Playoff moments as once again they are currently undervalued between $6-$10 for most of them, but I will not hesitate to get rid of most of these as new sets and new opportunities arise.

I think this is a well rounded strategy designed to optimize the collector experience and provide opportunities for account growth. As Top Shot grows and matures, I expect this strategy will also become more robust.

Happy collecting.