Hello pack junkies. Mojo jojo and Philosopher Prince have certainly been cooking up pack content undercover, just like Walter White and Jessie Pinkman in breaking bad (shoutout to Heisenberg from the discord while I'm using this reference).
Hopefully the working conditions are better than a 1970’s Caravan after the last round of investment in FanCraze.
Anyway, here’s what we’ll cover in the blog today
In this Blog:
Topic 1: The Foundation and Motley Crew Pack Drops scheduled for July 14th
- Basic “must have” details on the pack drop
- Moment breakdown — Including Hundred Teams
Topic 2: The Hundred 101
- An Intro to The Hundred?
- Some Initial FanCraze Flash thoughts around The Hundred
Topic 1: Double Pack Drop — July 14th
Ok — here is the no nonsense information you need for the drop.
Remember there are 2 packs dropping on the 14th. The Foundation Pack (which includes 1 Epic moment, 2 Rare moments, and 4 Common moments), and The Motley Crew Pack (which includes 2 Rare moments, and 2 Common moments)
What are the Pack Queue Timings?
I've tried to lay this out in chronological order — the FanCraze team have used the functionality in Discord to show the exact times in your location in the announcement over there — would recommend double checking your times there:
- The Queues for both packs drops will open at 2pm UTC
- The Queue will close for new entrants for the Foundation Pack at 2.45pm UTC
- Pack Purchasing will begin for Foundation Pack (if you are lucky in the queue spot) at 3pm UTC
- The Queue will close to new entrants for the Motley Crew Pack at 3.45pm UTC
- Pack Purchasing will being for Motley Crew Packs at 4pm UTC
What are the Pack Prices / Details of pack Contents?
First Pack Drop — Foundation Pack
- Pack Price: 149 USD per pack; 500 Available; 2 Packs Max per user
- Pack Contents / Moments: 7 Moments per Pack (Guaranteed — 4 Commons, 2 Rare and 1 Epic)
- Events Covered — Unknown at the time of publishing;
Second Pack Drop—Motley Crew Pack
- Pack Price: 59 USD per pack; 1000 Available; 6 Packs Max per user
- Pack Contents / Moments: 4 Moments per Pack (Guaranteed — 2 Commons, and 2 Rare)
- Events Covered — Unknown at the time of publishing;
Hopefully that helps — now on to players in the pack
Full Pack List Including Hundred Teams
Usually I include Badges in this part of my blog, but unfortunately the moment description is not available at this time in the pack drop sheet from FanCraze. It’s already getting late with me, so apologies to those that were looking forward to it.
The big news is we are getting secondary moments for a lot of players. Precisely 85 of the 159 moments are cases where a player, like Chris Gayle, is getting a second moment. The release volumes are small across a large number of moments in this release (159 as I said).
FanCraze have already confirmed debut badges are on the way, so Rohit Sharma’s Epic moment (who is now getting a Rare moment capped at 500) will always have that extra bit of collectability and be advantageous use in terms of Flash points too.
The exploration of how this impacts the overall FC economy in the short term is probably be the initial devalue of:
- Existing Epic moments for players that are having new Rare and Common moments released in this drop; and
- New Epic / Rare moments for players with other Rare’s / Commons already in circulation will probably initially be undervalued with a few exceptions (if you don't think folks will chase that Rohit rare then you aren't paying attention).
Some folks will not like this — and I can understand — but I've said in many, many blogs, that userbase growth is by far the biggest factor in this project longer term. DO you want the same 200 folks playing Flash day in day out with no growth….? No, of course not. I generally don't think this is anything to panic about right away if you do own Epics, you still have a leg up on the competition Flash wise, with a hopefully bigger base of users to compete against in the near future.
To me, some of the strategy in this drop is to offer newcomers an opportunity to get involved with their favorite players at a lower price point. If the World Cup in October is really to be the FanCraze festival we all want it to be, then the user base has to grow, and seeing Rohit Sharma at 1000 USD is probably a massive turn off for the casual NFT crowd who love cricket. This is the exact example of player many new users would search first up. (if you disagree on this, hit me up in the comments below!)
Additionally — I would personally love an Epic Hardik Pandya ahead of the world cup. Ditto for Root, Butler, Maxwell, Chahal…all quality performers in Flash, and sure to beat out the regularly used commons.
Finally — real life utility for Epics is in the works. Check out the below for some reassurance if you are a little unsure on the longer term plans.
Epic moments are only available in the Foundation Packs. Further, the Common and Rare moments in the are mutually exclusive (no overlap in each pack type).
The FanCraze team indicated that the upcoming Hundred Tournament (see below for my Hundred preview) was one of the key drivers behind the drop.
I’ve indicated where folks are part of the various Hundred squads. I've also included the official “Salary Band” for each player. This should hopefully be a guide to some of the players (pre-tournament) that have a premium in the eyes of each franchise that folks might be unaware of.
Note — with a list of moments this long, ive kept the analysis on each grouping light in the interest of getting the blog out quickly.
Foundation Pack
Epics (14 Different Moments)
Comments: All of these players already have moments on the platform, so keep that in mind. This will bring an interesting element to Flash, with a very small number of the top 25% serials being immediately available. There are no Women’s Epic moments in this drop as a note.
I like Pandya in this bunch in terms of an all-rounding Flash Stud sure to be full of use. With respect to the Hundred, Livingstone was MVP last year, and will be part of the England One day set up for some time. Nice pick up there too.
Finally, you know that Gayle 6 is going to be a Universe Boss classic. Maybe from a WC winning final perhaps?
Rare (16 Moments)
Comments: Here we start to get Rare moments for players with Epic’s already released. Rohit being the key example. As noted above, I think folks will chase that moment in particular, and with only 49 coming in this drop, and 65 already in circulation, it will still leave only 114 in circulation (with, i imagine, many holding the Epics for long term value).
Otherwise, QDK gets an upgrade from his Common moment,; Riaz is still a handful in the Hundred, and Kate Cross will be a regular for the Manchester Originals in The Hundred.
Commons (51 Moments)
Comments: Warner, Gill, Kohli, Rashid Khan — all Epics/ high priced rares that will now have commons (albeit in some cases more limited supply than the Epics). If you are a set / team / collector, then this is a potential opportunity to snag a Warner to round out your Aussie collection as an example. I've highlighted a few names that are key to their respective Hundred teams also.
We’ll now move onto the Motley Crew pack
Motely Crew Pack
Rare (18 Moments)
Comments: Some key figures in the Women’s game getting an upgrade from Common moments to have a Rare moment in play as well now. Starc gets a Rare moment too — could it be one of the wickets from the 2015 WC to dismiss the Kiwis in the final? Finally, Dawid Malan was atop the T20 Batting world rankings a mere 12 months ago — a fine pick up.
Commons (60 Moments)
Comments: There are bags of great players in this list, I’m excited to pick up a Jofra (fingers crossed), a Mitch Marsh ahead of the WC, and certainly a Harry Brook, who at aged 23 is poised to break into the England test side having made a few appearances in the white ball formats. Finally, Dane Van Niekerk was Women’s MVP of the Hundred last year.
The Hundred 101
Given at least a portion of this drop (in addition to existing moments) will be leveraged for FanCraze Flash around matches in the Hundred, lets focus on that to round out the blog.
Note: At the time of writing, the FanCraze blog on scoring for FanCraze Flash had not been updated. It is to be confirmed if the same Flash scoring system will be used as T20s or whether a new system will be implemented (one to watch)
The Hundred — There’s a Change in Format?
Yeah — another format of cricket to get your heads around. This is the 3rd different format of cricket that will be covered in FanCraze Flash, after T20 (IPL and Internationals) and International ODIs.
The Hundred was dreamt up by the England Cricket Board as “shorter and easier to consume” version of cricket, to be played through the English summer whilst schools were on extended holiday. I’ll admit it…I was pretty put off and skeptical by the whole thing when announced in 2019.
It seemed like a little bit of a money grab, with one clear exception…..as a proud consumer of Skips crisps, the Trent Rockets jersey is honestly the second best combination of style and sponsorship I've seen in sports. The sizzling Skips logo takes me back to the mid 90’s going to the corner shop after school:
You're all wondering who owns the #1 spot? Well that belongs to Getafe FC (a major football team in Spain) who in 2009 took on the sponsorship of Burger King, and released this absolute monstrosity….its gorgeous.
Yes, they printed that on the inside of their jerseys, and I promise this was a real thing . Go check it out.
Getting back on track, thankfully I’m not calling the shots at the ECB. First I thought Joe Root should remain as England captain (oh dear), AND, last year ~55% of tickets in the Hundred’s debut season were bought by folks that had never been to a cricket game before.
That’s still an astounding stat. One stroke of genius is that a single ticket gave access to both the Men’s and Women’s fixtures for the same day’s play, for the same teams as well. To give some additional context, it was the summer following 2020 COVID, and many folks were still not travelling abroad. We’ll see how the uptake goes this year.
Some quick Intros to the Hundred
- Each team faces 100 balls, team with most runs wins
- There are no 6 ball overs in the Hundred; bowling spells last either 5 or 10 balls (at the discretion of the captain),
- Bowlers can bowl a max of 20 balls each — so a minimum of 5 players will bowl in each team
- There are 8 teams in England, each with a Men’s and a Women’s team. The guys and girls play on the same day in the same location (hello Flash double-headers?)
- There is a round robin group format, with the top team making it to the final, and the 2nd and 3rd placed teams playing in a semi final
- Men’s — In 2021 the Southern Brave won a well contested final. Liam Livingstone of the Birmingham Phoenix was the MVP / Player of the Series
- Women’s — In 2021 The Oval Invincibles’ won, with Dané van Niekerk also taking the MVP / Player of the Series award as well as a champions medal
- Largely teams seemed to have kept their core players from last year so some sort of familiarity will be there in each team. Cricket form can be fickle — so take this with a pinch of salt — but here’s the table standings from last years competition as a guide for who performed well.
Given all of the above — here are 2 broader things I've been thinking about around the Hundred.
- Potential for a Joint Men’s and Women’s Flash:
Taking an example. Let’s say the London Spirit and Manchester Originals are scheduled to play a game. The Men and Women’s teams will both play on the same day. Just hours apart.
Might we see a franchise based Flash challenge involving Men and Women cricketers across two separate games? It would certainly make the swap very interesting —would you take a guaranteed Men / Women performance, or gamble on stud performing in the second game with bat and ball?
2. Chasing teams often take advantage of a paced innings, Bowlers Tended to have a Bigger Impact in the Men’s game, All rounders in the Women's’:
A Statistical points system is used in the Hundred to calculate the MVP. Looking at this can give us some insight into who the top performers were.
On the Men’s side, 3 of the top 4 performers were primarily bowlers, with Liam Livingstone being an all rounder in extremely good touch at the time. The logic I follow here on why this is, is that there is zero time to build an innings in a 100 ball game. You either get busy livin’, or get busy dying as a batter. Consequentially, wickets come at more regular intervals.
This also plays in to the team “pacing of an innings” point — the chasing side more often than not was helped significantly by “knowing” their target ahead of time. The guess work involved in setting a competitive 100 ball total was really tricky in the first season for most teams.
To illustrate this point— ~65% of Men’s fixtures were won by the the chasing side. Perhaps time to select bowlers / batters from the side fielding first?
Note: Whether this logic will also correspond to FanCraze Flash scoring will very much depend on the rules released
Ok, that does it for this blog — pleasure as always. Send in your most ridiculous sporting jerseys of all time, perhaps if there is one more ridiculous than the Burger King Getafe one ill do a giveaway.
See you soon,
Craig
