Why I am loving Sorare: NBA
The NBA is exciting with all the stars and the players making the most of the opportunities that come their way. Sorare does an incredible job of valuing those stars and the players that outperform their expectations and recent play. I have actually been a part of Sorare: Football since 2020. However, most of the past 2 years I have been focused on NBA TopShot and JPEG NFTs. I have had some good times with those projects but TopShot was mostly artificial pumps around challenges and turned into over saturation. So when Sorare came out with their NBA platform this October I hopped in. The free-to-play part of it is well balanced and gives everyone a chance to play, compete and have fun before, or without, paying for anything. Let’s dive into the free-to-play part.
Free-to-play: Common Cards & Competitions
When you sign up for Sorare: NBA you are given a choice between some Tier 1 cards. Once you choose your starter Tier 1, you are then given an assortment of other cards from Tier 2 to Tier 5. These cards can be used in the common competitions to earn more common cards and even Limited cards if your scores are among the best. More common cards means more flexibility in your lineups and ability to maximize your points each week. The two main common competitions are Contender and Champion.
Common Contender Competition
Contender is where to start to try and build up your common card gallery, your collection of cards. (Since writing this, Sorare has added Beginner competitions. Since I wasn’t able to compete in them I am going to link here to their blog explaining the new competitions available). Contender is a 110 point cap of 5 cards. Each card has a point value that is a reflection of the last 10 games (L10) that player scored in fantasy points. This means the player’s point value changes throughout the season and can be more valuable at different times and less valuable at other times. Starting to see the fun in choosing lineups? If everyone on Sorare gets to choose a lineup of five players and their L10 totals are 110 or less, then the competitors that choose the lineups that outperform their L10 the most will win the biggest rewards. You can see in my lineup from a previous week that I scored 179.85, or 69.85 over the team’s combined L10. Reddish was the big winner as his cost was 11 and he scored 50 fantasy points.
So what do you win? In the Common Contender you can only win more common cards, but you are guaranteed at least a Tier 5 common card just for entering.
New common cards are given at first sign up, through daily drops the first few weeks of signing up and through rewards in common competitions. You can also get a new common card once every 24 hours by choosing one of your current ones to swap from a random pool offered by Sorare, more on that later.
Here is a good spot to highlight what you may have already picked up on. Common cards have unlimited supply but they can’t be bought. So there is still scarcity in a way with each person’s gallery. You can’t just go out and buy every player. You have to be strategic in your swaps and compete with others to try build through rewards. This is what makes the free-to-play version of Sorare fun. But who cares if you are just earning more cards that you can’t sell? That takes us to the Common Champion competition.
Common Champion Competition
In this you get to have five total cards but your highest cost card is “free” and the other four have a total point limit of 120 based on their L10s, or an average of 30 per card. You can see below that Anthony Davis is considered my MVP, the “free” one, and the other four players add up to 120. Don’t worry, Sorare does the math for you and I haven’t seen them make a mistake yet. You can see in this lineup below that there are a few more heavy hitters than in the Contender competition. The MVP being free and the cap increase of 10 overall is a huge difference on the lineups that you can bring in. In the case below, my lineup is coming in with a base of 175. So until you can your common gallery has an MVP plus four other cards that average 30 for their L10s, you want to put your best lineup in the Contender competition and build the gallery. You will then start earning the higher value cards and be ready to enter good lineups into both the Contender and Champion.
Well what is so cool about competing in the Champion competition? The rewards! Not everyone is a winner in this competition. The best of the best get rewarded with cards. The lowest reward you can earn is a Common Tier 2 card. After that the rewards are all Limited cards from Tier 5 all the way up to Tier 1 for the top 3 teams.
Limited cards are the first level of rarity that you can sell on the marketplace and each card has a capped supply of 5,000. They also can be used in additional competitions just like the common cards can, except now you are earning more Limited cards and new Rare cards (P.S. there are also Ultra Rare and Unique cards as seen in the graphic below). So now your free-to-play has a path to making money, playing in more competitions, earning collectibles all while still being free. Are you sold yet?
Dueces Out
More blogs to come in the next few days about the basics as well as deeper strategy and tactics. For now though I hope you hop into Sorare and see if it is fun for you too. If you haven’t signed up for Sorare yet and want to support me, you can use this link: https://sorare.com/r/dueceswildbill , or copy it into your browser. If you end up buying five limited cards, then you and I will both get an additional free Limited card. Pretty cool! Let me know what you think in the comments below, on twitter @Dueceswildbill, or on Discord at Dueceswildbill#5006.