NBA 2K20 MyTeam: Prime Disappointment

Karl Malone?

Seriously, 2K? You delay and build up the Prime Series 3 reward for nearly a month, and the best you can come up with is Karl Malone (plus Banana Boat crew card duplicates)?

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Okay, objectively I’ll admit the Mailman was a great player (and his card has nice stats/badges), but who could have possibly thought that Karl Malone would be an exciting conclusion to the Prime series?

His cards consistently go for next to nothing in MyTeam, and he’s largely unknown to the target audience of the game. He also doesn’t bring anything new to the table that a dozen other cards (Bill Russell, etc.) don’t already bring. (And, yes, this is even counting the silly addition of being able to play small forward, which Russell can do too — position locks are ridiculous.) And last but not least, when you take into consideration his personal issues alongside the current 2K political climate, it just seems like a strange choice.

I know I’m not the only person who thought the reward should have been a G.O.A.T. card.

Wilt maybe? Jerry West? Or even another Bill Russell would have made more sense. This is even more true if collecting the G.O.A.T. cards ends up leading to something, which I think a lot of people are hoping will happen — I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Honestly, the best solution here would be to have Karl as the final Prime player, and then G.O.A.T. LeBron be the reward. The community would have been thrilled, and the auction house would have been on fire all weekend. Then next week 2K could release Prime Super Packs and rake in that cash for people still trying to lock-in for LeBron.

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Instead, everyone was rage-selling off their Prime cards and shopping for older cards in previously released sets.

Kawhi and Paul George dropped easily a 100K+ MT in value, and Luka/ Lamar plummeted even further. All the while, someone like James Wiseman skyrocketed. James was peaking at 400K last week, and now he’s 600K+. Plus cards with token value also rose, as everyone’s content-related hopes and dreams turned to a potential token market update (which is way overdue at this point).

But let’s not allow Karl Malone to overshadow another huge point of contention (for me at least). Yes, I’m talking about those Banana Boat cards.

How lazy do you have to be to just recycle players again and again. Sure, there are more badges, and LeBron/Melo can play the shooting guard now, but come on! There are still so many players that need new cards, some of whom are stuck in diamond tier or lower. And I won’t even waste time discussing Rondo or Duncan, whose new Prime versions aren’t even worth the time it takes to quick sell them.

The only Banana Boat player actually in need of a galaxy opal was Chris Paul. But in July, no one cares about another short point guard. His card is so insanely popular (sarcasm) that I easily could have just bought him for 30K Friday afternoon.

But I didn’t have to because I pulled two of him. Lucky me?

Yeah, on Friday I did a dumb thing. After hearing about Karl, I also jumped the gun and put the Prime players I didn’t care about anymore on the auction house. I figured I’d cash out, wash my hands of this nonsense, and use the MT to get a card I did want — like Out of Position KD or something.

Well, as I mentioned before, everyone else on the planet also put their cards up, so my PG ended up selling for only about 300K (days ago he was going for 500K+) and Luka got me about 100K. Still a decent amount of MT, but nowhere near what I was hoping for going into it. I think I’m going to hold onto Kawhi and Lamar for now, and maybe their value will rise again someday (doubtful, but I do still enjoy using them).

So all of that new MT, plus MT I had been saving up to buy the final Prime player, was burning a hole in my virtual pocket. What do to, what to do? Well, I didn’t have anywhere near enough for KD, so, I just started opening Prime packs.

I don’t know why because I don’t really care about those cards. Sure, I’d take LeBron, but I knew there was no way I’d get him. Honestly, I think I was just pissed off and didn’t care anymore. So off I went into the abyss.

750K MT disappeared down the drain in a matter of minutes, which translates to nearly 75 packs. Guess what I got?

• Two galaxy opal Chris Pauls.
• Five pink diamond Rajon Rondos.
• And more diamond Duncans than I could possibly count.

Yeah, seeing this over and over again didn’t really make me feel better. And seriously though, with there being five opals to choose from, why on earth did I get the worst card (sorry, Chris) two times? The odds of that are pretty small, right?

Well, unfortunately that’s just how 2K seems to work.

I think we all know from experience there are some players who get pulled repeatedly, while some are extremely rare (or borderline non-existent). Technically they do post pack odds overall, and mine were on par, but I think in the future 2K needs to post the odds of each individual player. After all, there is no way I’ll believe that the chances of me pulling LeBron were the same as getting Chris Paul. That’s not right.

So the moral of this whole story is just to keep expectations REALLY low when/if you open packs. Or maybe just don’t do it at all. And while typically, if memory serves, the odds do improve late in the cycle, that just doesn’t seem to be the case in July 2020.

On the bright side though, maybe this Prime thing was for the best. I have a lot of great cards already, and while it might be July, it’s still early July so hopefully there’s more great cards and theme sets to come. I wouldn’t have wanted to lock-in all of that MT anyway.