A brave new world was opened to the public yesterday, and after years of playing along with Topps Digital in their apps, I felt I had to give it a try. Originally, I wasnt going to participate, as I expected the feeding frenzy to be too evident to want to brave the enormous traffic. As the countdown got closer, I felt it was worth chasing down a few packs to experiment. Ill say that my expectations were low going in, and in some areas those expectations were warranted. In others, I ended up having a lot more fun than I expected.

Buying Packs – A Complete Disaster (12pm-1pm CT)

Here is where I think my user experience was about as bad as it could get. When the original drop was supposed to take place, traffic on the site crashed the interface. I honestly do not understand how anyone could expect there to be anything less than a hoard of people rumbling for the hottest thing to hit the market in years. NFTs are quickly becoming the world’s most expensive form of collectible, and Topps should be ashamed that they didnt work with the platform to get this set up more adequately. It was a complete train wreck, and everyone who hated the queue room for Top Shot packs likely laughed hysterically at how poorly the experience with this release went down.

Somehow, after waiting for the drop delay, and then constantly refreshing, I was able to get 1 premium pack and 5 standard packs. My total cost for everything was about 125 bucks. Because of the enormous traffic, and my lack of familiarity with the NFT releases, I was a bit shell shocked by the whole thing – especially because I wasnt sure if my transaction went through. Others around the community detailed how frustrating this whole experience was, even more so when they were eventually shut out and refunded the money because packs were oversold.

Collectors were reporting that transactions were going through on their credit cards, even though they were getting errors on the screen. Most were refunded if there were no packs to be sold, while others saw giant charges stick because they didnt know they were buying multiple groups of packs.

If I was one of those people shut out, not only would I be upset, but I would have been done. It wouldnt be worth the added effort to chase down packs and cards if I knew that my original investment was basically cancelled. Hopefully Topps Digital offers some sort of make good.

Cool Down Period – Pack Market Opens (1pm to 4pm)

I wasnt aware that you couldnt open the packs immediately after they were delivered to your crypto wallet, so I started messing around with Atomic Hub and the Wax platform features. First, getting money into your wallet to buy cards from the market is a long process. You have to provide a ton of information, it has to be reviewed before your payment loads the money into your wallet for access, and for some, the platform to buy WAX currency isnt available in their area. This isnt BitCoin, which seems to be more universally accepted and easier to access, its a specific currency called WAXP, which is how the cards are bought and sold.

Although you buy packs with credit card, you buy the resales of the card with WAXP. Exchange rates are 1 WAX = ~.23 cents. During the timeframe where packs were sold out but not able to be opened, the packs themselves could be bought and sold. Most packs were running from $200 to $300 on the premium side and $30 on the standard. I found out later why it was vital to focus on the premium packs and basically just forget about the standard.

Opening the Packs (4pm)

After the traffic died down and the packs were delivered to my wallet, I was able to open everything during the designated time after 4pm CT. The pack opening was clunky and slow, likely because of more increased traffic, and a lot of issues with loading images and delivering pack contents to the wallets. Considering how advanced Topps Digital has gotten the pack opening experience to be on their apps, I was quite disappointed that it was as weirdly presented as it was.

I opened the standard packs first, which yielded 6 NFT cards per pack, usually 5 commons and 1 gold uncommon. There were chances at Epic cards, but I didnt pull any. At this point, I had zero frame of reference, so it was just hoping to get a Trout or some other good player. I was lucky in pulling a base Trout, a base Tatis, and a few other nice RCs, but that was about it. Turns out that the Trout base is worth more than a lot of the higher level stuff from other lesser players.

The premium pack was much different. At 100 dollars MSRP, it guaranteed 45 NFT cards, including chances at all the chases. I pulled 2 cards that had 70 copies minted, a 1986 insert that was set originally at 170 copies minted, and 6 Rares, which have a rainbow look to them. Unfortunately, I didnt pull any of the crazy rare stuff, but I knew I had at least my money back just from seeing the players I got.

Pack Contents – The Confusion Begins (4:30pm)

The parallel structure from a visual perspective seems really easy to follow. The more animated the cards are, the better they are. There are signature versions of some of the base cards, and rare parallels that can get down to 1/1 if you are lucky enough to pull them. With people able to buy 10 premium packs at a time, I hope those people ended up getting more lucky than I did.

Here is where things get confusing. Each card is numbered with a mint. Basically, if there are 2600 base cards from the set minted, each card has a corresponding serial number that ties the NFT to a specific hosted collectible. For some of the rare epic and legendary, it seems like they will only have the number of mints that are present in this first drop. For the stars parallel its 76, for 70th anniversary parallel its 70, and for the 1986 holo signatures, its like 13, down to the platinum 1/1s. Everything else looks like there are more drops that will add minted copies to these cards.

You can see from the pictures below, why I think this is the case:

Basically, if you are ripping the standard packs and hoping for cards that will be worth holding onto, there isnt much there that will be that. All of the good cards are in the premium packs, and that’s just a reality people are going to have to deal with.

The Card Market Opens (4pm)

Once packs started being opened, the Atomic Hub market immediately was flooded with people selling the cards that had made it into their wallets. For those few with WAXP to spend, prices were insane. Some of the rarities had been sold in the 5 figure range right off the bat, while some of the not rare stuff was still getting to $100 and over.

I decided to take my time, but I quickly realized that was a mistake. Because there was so little currency floating around, the were only a handful of buyers and a deluge of sellers. You cant just buy this stuff on a credit card or debit card, collectors need to buy the currency and use the currency to buy the cards. With the process being so involved, most people had a ton of cards to sell but nothing to buy with.

I ended up trying to list a few cards. After I listed 3 I got an error saying I was out of RAM. For a new person in this market, I had no idea what this meant. I finally sold my first card and was able to list another. They were cheap sales, but enough that I could spend 3 dollars of WAXP to buy more RAM to list as many as I wanted.

The first few sales of the big named players were gigantic, but over time, they dropped. Atomic Hub gives you a value for your wallet and that number was ever changing. Because sales on the market are 100% transparent if you know where to look, it was easy to see where people were selling their goods.

The Race to the Bottom (8-12am)

Once the Simplex transactions started going through for people, the sales started becoming more regular. By this point, I had gathered a few pieces of information.

1. I was done wasting my time with players not named Trout, Acuna and Tatis.
2. The lower the mint number the better the value of the card. Number 1 mints were selling for 4 figures. Jersey number mints are also a premium.
3. If you had a higher mint, you had to be the lowest price on the market to sell your card.
4. You had to constantly adjust your listings to make sure your pricing was reflective of the market.
5. Buying cards listed with the wrong price by mistake and selling them at the correct price was a great way to make money to buy more cards.

With this information in hand, I started selling the junk and building up wax to buy the big named players, especially Trout. I was aiming to get the lowest mint number I could afford, because as more rounds are released the first set of mint numbers will be worth more than the second round. For example:

If you see mint numbers above these in future releases, you will know it wasnt part of the original drop. Historically this will mean the lower mints will be more valuable. Seems crazy, but I can almost guarantee this will be the case.

At about 9p, people started to see the downward trends of the garbage NFT cards take shape. The market started falling and it became a race to the bottom with most of the cards. I expect this to eventually level out as more currency becomes available, and as more people become more educated on the way the market works.

My Final Count

After buying and selling for about 4 hours, I ended up with about 1500 WAX plus inventory from the packs. I turned that into Trout, Trout and more Trout, plus a little bit of Tatis and Acuna. I didnt get anything likely worth holding, especially if more drops are on the way.

My best card in inventory is one of the 70th anniversary parallels I havent sold yet, and the Rare Mike Trout base. Both are in the 180 dollar range at the time of this article being posted. Overall, I have enough in my WAXP wallet to cover my original investment, plus all the cards in my inventory. If everything eventually goes to zero, I am out zero dollars. The WAXP currency will be reclaimed as soon as I figure out the cheapest way to do so.

The Future

First, I wholeheartedly believe more packs are coming. This will impact a huge part of the market. If you are a buyer on the outside looking to get in, DO NOT BUY ANYTHING WITH AN INFINITE COUNT until you see how this goes down. If you are a seller, get rid of your junk fast. If you are both, focus on the things that will remain valuable as more cards are released.

Secondly, the giant prices paid for common stuff early on should be an indicator that this market will function almost identically to the trading card secondary market that already exists. Get your stuff listed fast and sell fast if its not exceptionally rare. Again, none of these practices should be unfamiliar to people who have been a part of this hobby forever.

Lastly, I think there are legs to this type of thing, just like there were legs for Topps Digital when the apps had no ownership to the end user. It may not be insanely successful for the release of Series 1, but if they release super premium products on the NFT platform you better believe its going to be worthwhile to check those out.

Overall Experience

The lack of planning regarding pack dissemination and the lack of information about the releases of future cards on the platform wasnt good for the end user experience. The marketplace wheeling and dealing is fun if you keep it cheap. There is money to be made, that’s for sure, but I dont think its set up to be as valuable as the Top Shot moments.

Topps kind of limited themselves to a specific audience knowing that they were just basically selling NFT versions of their cards. Top Shot’s moments seem to be on a downward sales trend as well, so this bubble may already be deflating.

Hopefully this is just version 1.0 and Topps figures out a way to improve everything top to bottom.