DraftKings Reignmaker Review

For the last few weeks, I have been playing the DraftKings Reignmaker NFT fantasy football game.?It’s been a lot of fun, and I think it exemplifies some important web3 principals for other builders in sports and video gaming.?I wanted to share my experience.

Back in February, I wrote an overview on the ways that gambling and fantasy sports could move onchain.?In this piece, I discussed a company I’ve been tracking since summer 2021 called Own The Moment.?OTM started as Bloomberg for NBA Top Shot, and their platform has progressed significantly over the last year.?They have added analytics for NFL All Day, the video highlight NFT program from the NFL and Dapper Labs.?They also created Rumble, a DFS style game you can play with your NFL All Day moments.?

Own The Moment’s NFT based fantasy football game TOC was chronicled in that prior post.?It was a great experience that built on the success in European football of Sorare.?In TOC, you purchased a pack of NFT trading cards, ripped it open online to see which players you got, and then used them in free-to-play (F2P) tourneys each week for cash prizes.?Sorare was the first big player in this category of F2P NFT games.??They started with European football, and now the company has expanded to MLB and MLS. Sorare is launching with the NBA for the upcoming season soon.

DraftKings first announced their Reignmakers game in May 2022.?The betting giant had some success with their NFT collectibles product in partnership with Tom Brady and Autograph, so this was their second onchain offering.?Reignmakers worked in much the same way as TOC.?The big change is that DraftKings secured the rights to the team logos with the NFL and the player likeness with the NFLPA.?This doesn’t change the gameplay, but it is more fun.

The other thing DraftKings did different is including the concept of rarity.?They set five tiers – Core, Rare, Elite, Legendary, and Reignmaker.?You can own the same Jonathan Taylor card with the same stats, but each week DraftKings hosts contest that are only available to users that are playing cards with higher rarity tiers. ?These give significantly more value to the cards at the higher tiers since there are way less of these minted. The rarest tiers might only have 4 of a particular player, while the Core tier has thousands of each player.

Game participants initially purchased packs of NFT trading cards and then ripped them open online.?The packs with mostly Core cards cost as little as $19.99, while the packs guaranteed to have at least one Reignmaker card sold for $29,999.99.?Opening the packs is good fun.?You don’t know what you’ll get when a pack is opened. Will you get a rare Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes??Or will you get a Baker Mayfield or Marcus Mariotta??You click the button, they play some music, the cards spin, and then they are revealed.?It’s a great user experience.

I jumped into the game right before the NFL season kicked off and purchased $1,000 worth of packs at a variety of rarity tiers.?These are bought with credit cards not Crypto.?The cards are tied to your DraftKings account not a Crypto wallet.?My initial packs got me a total of about 50 cards, so an average purchase price of $20 each.?I got super lucky with an Elite rarity Josh Allen card, but I missed on my one Legendary card with little used Detroit Lions WR Quintez Cephus (only 2 receptions through the first five games).?I did great with my cards in the Rare tier, snagging Justin Jefferson and Jonathan Taylor.

Once I had my cards, it was time for the first week of the NFL season.?I’ve played traditional Daily Fantasy Sports (DFS) contests before, and I honestly feel like it’s mostly a sucker’s game.?The tourneys with the big cash prizes get hundreds of thousands of entrants, and the winners are typically setting hundreds or even thousands of lineups programmatically. The odds of picking one or two random lineups and winning are nearly as bad as buying scratcher tickets.?It hasn’t exactly felt this way with Reignmakers.

Each week they have 50+ contest you can enter with your cards.?Some are for individual games like TNF or MNF, but most contests cover the full Thursday to Monday NFL week.?Most of the games require 4 or 5 cards, but they have bigger ones as well.?There are pools with $1,000 payouts and others that pay $25,000 or more.?In total, DraftKings has set $1MM each week in prizes.?As I mentioned above, many of the contest are only available if you have cards in the higher rarity tiers, but there are always some good payouts available for the Core cards.?

Another big consideration in setting lineups is the Star designation.?Most of the contest only allow one Star card to be played.?Guys like Jefferson, Rodgers, Allen, Cupp, etc are all labeled Stars.?DraftKings has said they will reclassify players at some point during the season based on their performance in this Star category. This is good, since it limits the ability for a high roller to buy up all Star players and dominate a week.?It is also bad, since I got 8 Star cards out of my first 50.?I would need to have at least 8 separate entries to use all of these Stars in a single NFL week, which would require a minimum of 32 playable cards of the right skill positions.?I don’t have that, and I don’t really want to snag that many individual cards in their marketplace.?As a result, a bunch of my Star cards sit idle each week.

Last week I was able to enter two contests.?The first had a $10K prize pool and required five cards – 1 QB, 1 RB, 1 WR, and 2 Flex.?They had 9,991 entrants and about half of the players received some cash back.?I had a solid week with a team of QB Lawrence, RB James Wilson, and WRs Kupp, Corey Davis, and Diggs.?I scored 97 fantasy points and will win back $4 for a 417th place finish this week.?The first-place winner will get $1K, and they put up a massive 150 points with an average of 30 fantasy points per card.?The second contest I entered this week was a 9 card “Deep Roster” option.?A few of my QBs are currently injured, so I thought this was a better use of my cards this week.?I’m going to win $3 for a team headlined by Justin Jefferson.?What I’ve learned is to be successful you need good players without the Star designation and you need lots of position diversity.?Just like season long fantasy, you also need your players to stay healthy.

One other fun element of Reignmakers is that they have a secondary marketplace where you can trade your cards.?Once it became clear that I couldn’t use my Elite Josh Allen card every week, I went ahead and listed it in the marketplace.?It sold for $809 net of fees.?I also dumped that Legendary Quintez Cephus and an Elite Gerald Everett for about $200 each.?This got me back more than my initial buy-in amount, so I’m basically playing with house money this whole season.?Most decent players at the Core rarity tier trade for $10-30, so I’ve used the marketplace to add players and get me into additional weekly contests.?Junk cards you wouldn’t use in weekly contests go for $1-3.?Like NBA Top Shot, I got about 25% junk cards.?Not terrible.

If you’ve read this far, you might be wondering is this really a web3 product??Not exactly.?The cards are technically onchain, but this whole game could just be run on the DraftKing’s internal servers and not much would be different.?There is no external marketplace or uses for the cards off their platform.?However, it’s a fun experience and I’m hopeful it will become more decentralized over time.

Last point, while this is not a paid promotion, as noted above I do own 60+ Reignmaker cards.?Games like this are risky.?You can buy lots of cards and never win any money back.?Play at your own risk, and do your own research.?

OK, that was a lot of details.?I’ll wrap it up here.?I’m sure we will continue to see fun innovations in web3 fantasy sports, and I’ll have more to say then.

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