Population of First MLB NFTs Minted to Ethereum Blockchain in 2018:
Commons: 106,760
Bronze: 16,556
Silver: 9,402
Gold: 1,891
Legendary: 913
There are 10,000 Cryptopunks. There are only 913 MLB Crypto Baseball legendary NFTs. The legendary population of these first ever MLB NFTs is a portrait of randomness and digital scarcity. The 913 legends are the most sought after NFTs for longtime fans and collectors of MLB Crypto Baseball/MLB Champions.
Game developer Lucid Sight minted and auctioned a portion of these legends directly on their native marketplace, but most legendary NFTs had to be generated and obtained as a reward from live gameplay.
This article will not be an in-depth guide on how reward “rolls” worked. Rosters, rewards and gamecards were designed in an overly complicated manner, but the MLB Crypto Baseball community understood that we were in early, uncharted waters with Major League Baseball, Lucid Sight, and Ethereum Blockchain Dapp projects.
We knew that legends were the holy grail. We tried to set our rosters as optimally as we understood the parameters to give us the best chance at “rolling” a legendary. I will go over some highlights of the 913 legendary population from the perspective of a collector that set rosters and prayed to the RNG Gods to hit the 0.4% chance at a legendary MLB NFT .
Only one Juan Soto rookie and one Shohei Ohtani rookie exist among the legendary population. There is no 2018 legendary Ronald Acuna Jr. rookie. An Acuna Jr. never generated from a reward, and Lucid Sight never auctioned one.
I remember my Atlanta Braves rewards and overall sentiment of the 2018 MLB Crypto Baseball community. We were all hunting for that Acuna legend. Unfortunately, no one was able to bank one. We have to settle for the gold version of Ronald Acuna Jr. His rookie MLB NFT will never be in legendary form.
The randomness, scarcity, and feeling of incompletion can be felt throughout the MLB NFT legendary population. Most players do not have a 2018 legendary version of themselves.
Luckily, two MLB Crypto users hit Yahtzee, and we will always have the Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto rookie legend NFTs permanently imprinted on the Ethereum blockchain. At the time of writing this article, Juan Soto has a CSV (Cryptoslam Value) of $50,000 USD and Ohtani is at $45,000 USD.
The most popular and sought after teams in MLB Crypto Baseball during live gameplay were the usual suspects like the New York Yankees, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros. These teams won a lot of games and all made the playoffs in 2018.
This is significant because rewards were only generated after real life team wins. Secondly, playoff teams played more games than non-playoff teams. Reward generation continued into the postseason but only for the 2018 playoff teams.
Playoff/winning teams produced more rewards and, ultimately, more legendary NFTs than their non-playoff/cellar-dweller counterparts. That is why there are only five San Francisco Giant legendary NFTs and only four Baltimore Oriole legendary NFTs represented in the 2018 MLB NFT population.
There are some great players on non-playoff teams that are extremely hard to find in legend form or do not exist at all because they played on a bad team with less reward generation .
In 2018, the Boston Red Sox beat the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. It makes sense that Boston (142 NFT legends) and the Dodgers (147 NFT legends) have the most legendary representation in the 913 MLB NFT legendary population. They were the only two teams generating rewards at the end of the 2018 MLB postseason.
The first ever MLB NFT legend generated/auctioned directly from Lucid Sight was SN#543 Dillon Peters of the Miami Marlins.
Follow us on twitter @FirstMLBNFT and let us know what you think of the 913 first ever legendary NFTs licensed by the MLB and MLBPA.
