The numbers are in for all three pack drops of the upcoming Run It Back ’86-’87 three-day bonanza. We’ll dive into the numbers and talk through some strategy about the new challenge structures that were announced. As we start to see some of the Historical Challenges go live, be on the lookout for new tools next week that should help influence your buy, sell, hold decisions!

Archive Packs (Common)

Ok so nothing really crazy here. Pierce and Cummings are going to have some buying pressure due to Milwaukee Bucks team set. Most of the other guys kinda feel like they will all roughly cost the same. Long story short here, the Archive pack should be neutral EV, there shouldn’t be big losers, but only real upside is in the 2 of you who land the Magic Johnson legendary.

They announced yesterday that these new Archive moments will need to be burned for the 3 new Archive rewards. I’m personally taking the wait and see approach here on if that matters. If they require 10 archives to be burned, and there’s around 7000 reward moments between Spud Webb, Artis Gilmore, and Dell Curry then that means more than half of the new supply will be gone. This will be a common theme here in this article, but this dynamic could really start to mess with set bottlenecks. Not exactly a guarantee that the lowest minted reward will be the bottleneck.

I think maybe there’s some upside here that these things have a floor of $10 or something during challenges, but I also think it’s just as likely that these drop back to $3 after the challenges, so I’m not going to do anything besides project neutral EV for this Archive pack.

Run It Back Packs (Rare)

I think there is a clear top tier here with Magic, Olajuwon, and Clyde. Then, I think Malone, Parrish, and the two new Denver Bottlenecks Lever & English come in next. From there, it could really be a crapshoot. I tend to always think things get tiered out a little more gradually, but there’s a real shot that the rest of the moments come crashing down and there’s 13 floor moments or whatever. We are mostly trying to be directionally correct here with the EV calcs, and what we can see from the EV is that yes, this is a good pack to go for. The new Lockdown Challenges is where it gets interesting.

So I think the Lockdown Mechanics are going to be similar to the Crafting Challenges. Theoretically, there shouldn’t be much of a drop off after the challenge completes because all of those moments will be locked up. If there’s not much drop off, then that means the floor prices need to be propped up a bit because I just can’t see a world where Larry Bird only costs like $400 or $500 to lock up. Because of these two reasons, I have juiced up the floor projections for all of the RIB guys and I’ve only included a 10% premium in the challenge slot.

A really important thing that is worth noting, that can’t be accounted for in the projections…is the difference between the Larry Bird and Dennis Rodman challenge pieces. When Rodman gets announced, all of the Bird moments should shoot up and all of the Rodman moments should come down. I think there’s two ways to handle this. First, you can decide to not take the gamble of Bird vs. Rodman and sell them while the uncertainty premium is priced in before 9/26. Or, you can wait, hopefully hit the Bird side…and print. However, if you don’t hit the Bird side, I still think there’s a path for your Rodman moments to keep increasing in value through the challenge and maybe they even pop above where they were at during the “uncertainty period”.

Ok final note here, because it’s an awful lot to take in. It appears they have purposefully left 25 of each of these moments out of packs (never seen this before). In addition, there will also be about 500 packs kept in reserve. So all of these RIBs should start in the circulation range of 449 instead of 499. In burning, there is incentive to spend less to complete since it’s the cheapest moments you are getting rid of. However in Locking, there’s incentive to lock players you need for Leaderboards, or more expensive better TSS options. Because of this, I don’t think everyone is going to just lock the floor and I think again, we’ll have some interesting bottleneck dynamics to watch out for. I wouldn’t expect Bird or Rodman to be the bottleneck for this set (for the last year at least).

I’ll have more tools coming out once these challenges go live, and we can revisit some of the above points in finer detail to start figuring out our strategy for these.

Legacy Packs (Legendary)

Honestly, I don’t think there’s a ton to talk about here. I could be a bit low on these numbers, but I definitely don’t think I am going to be high. Again, they have purposefully left out 3 Legacy moments from packs (haven’t seen this before), so I’m not sure what they are going to do with them. Good luck in this queue and go grab a Magic Skyhook!!!