Article was originally published in MVHQ on July 24, 2023 by JakeAndBake. Some information may be outdated.

 

The season is approaching! Reignmakers gave their keynote address today to provide details on what to expect for the 2023 season. I wrote up a recap of the keynote address and added some of my takes on the changes they plan to implement. 

Keynote Address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ahZaSer78

 

 

Product Updates & Enhancements 🛠

• Added Bulk Entry of Lineups
• Personal Franchise Score will update in real-time
• Added a Players page
• Overall goal is to reduce user friction.
  • Mentioned they plan to implement more “bulk actions” such as delisting all cards at once.
    

My Take:

 

Nothing very exciting here. It's good to see they are adding more bulk features to reduce time spent performing actions on their site though.

 

Contest Plan & Prizes

• Over $30 million in Prizes
  • $22.4m GPP prizing
  • $3.4m Special Events
  • $1m DFS satellites
  • $1m 2023 World Championship
  • $2.2m to 2022 contests
• Ability to win NFTs, Packs, & DFS satellites in addition to the Cash
• Deep Roster, Classic, & Showdown contest types will all be coming back this year.
• Elite, Legendary, & Reignmaker cash prizing will be more flat this year.
• Throughout the season, Cash prizing at Core will start to decrease and those prizes will get allocated to Elite+
• They will be “effectively doubling” the card prizing for 2023 contests from what was offered in 2022
• Special Events are things like the Holiday Millionaire and Special Set contests.
  • They may add some “experiential” contests this year where you can win an “Experience” (they did VIP tickets to couple golf tournaments in PGA for example)
• Type of contests: Normal GPPs, Single Entry, 3-Max, High Payouts up top, but also some deeper payout contests.
• Rarity requirements for each tier will be the same as last year.

 

My Take:

• GPP prizing is what myself and majority of players care about the most and that decreased by $5 million from last year. Pretty disappointing. Their excuse is they allocated that money to 2022 contest payouts & DFS satellites, but math doesn't add up.
• Flatter total prizing across Elite, Leg, RM is rather significant change. Would expect this to mean less money to Elite, more to Legendary, same/more to Reignmaker. Definitely keep this in mind when deciding what tier to purchase lineups for.
• Double the amount of cards available in contests this year isn't too bad. I will likely employ the strategy of going heavy on pack contests early in the year to increase my entry amount and then switch all my action to cash contests as the season progresses and card supply inflates.

 

Franchise Score Overview 🔢

• $2 million cash goes to Franchise score prizes
  • $1.26 million to Overall Leaderboard
    • Ranking based on cumulative season-long FS
    • 13 diff snapshots
  • $750k to Featured Drop Leaderboard
    • Time-based Franchise Score earned during special moments of season
    • 5 Snapshots
• First Franchise Score snapshot will be August 10th - $150k prize pool
• No longer doing weekly drive snapshots

 

My Take:

 

I like that they are doing fewer, larger franchise score payouts. It'll feel like a more significant payday.

  

No mention of how top-heavy the payouts will be this year, but if it's similar to last year, than FS will be really only worth prioritizing for the biggest of whales. Otherwise, it's just a little additional payout to keep in mind.

 

Set Structure & Cadence

• There will be 3 Headline Sets
  • Play-Action
    • First drop will be on August 3rd
    • 3x Franchise Score Multiplier
    • Set Gated Access to half of the 2023 RMF WC Qualifier
    • Exclusive Achievements
  • Rush
    • Drops End of August
    • 2x Franchise Score
    • Up to $500k in additional contest prizing dependent upon cumulative contest entries
  • Air It Out
    • Drops Mid-October
    • 5x Franchise Score
    • Includes new players not released in previous sets
• There will be a preseason set pack drop on August 3rd that gives access to preseason contests.
• There will be a “Supercharged” set for Reignmaker-tier only where you can exchange those players for a 2024-25 season card with only a crafting token.
• Amount of 2023 Elite, Legendary, & Reignmaker cards will be the same as the 2022 supply. 
  

 

Unsold Inventory

• They will have defined start & end dates to every drop.
• Prior to start date they will announce what happens to unsold inventory for every drop.
  • Could be burned, could go to crafting, could be resold again

 

My Take:

• Giving us details on supply of player editions and timing of drops is a huge improvement on last year, where we were basically flying blind.
• All 3 headline sets will have dropped by Week 7 of the season. That is a real quick rollout and player card supply will be increasing very fast early on in the season. Something to keep in mind when thinking through your strategy.
• Preseason packs are an awesome idea and much appreciated from a degen like myself.

 

Main Takeaways:  👨‍🍳

• Not happy about reduced prize pools for GPPs & lack of innovative improvements to the product
• Happy about clearer expectations on supply, timing, payouts. And preseason is cool.

 

Overall feeling is neutral/slight disappointment from that Keynote. I still plan to play NFL pretty heavily as I believe there will be edge for those with deep NFL, Fantasy Sports, & Market knowledge.