Not that long ago, I told you about NBA 2K26's Chills Festival, which offered a Pink Diamond LeBron James prize card that was pay-to-win, egregiously so. The festival gave a token after each victory in a game mode. Starting from the lowest rarity, it took roughly 3,000 wins in about two weeks to earn James.
Despite this, some absolute savages on YouTube were able to earn LeBron. NBA 2K26 decided it would fix those grinders. The prize card in the new MyTeam Festival, Galaxy Opal Shaquille O' Neal, requires about 9,000 wins in about two weeks. Or, of course, you could do what 2K truly wants you to do, which is to buy thousands of dollars' worth of packs to earn enough tokens to buy the card.
Crazy thing, the festival offers Amethyst Kel'el Ware, a card that most pro players consider to be far better than the Galaxy Opal version of Shaq. I've heard it said that this version of Shaq is essentially an NBA 2K26 IQ test. If you go out of your way to earn this, pros will question if you know ball. That said, if O'Neal is your favorite player, I am not going to tell you how to spend your time or money. I will say there are some really good free cards in this exchange. Diamond Kon Kneuppel is an absolute beast.
Being completely fair in my assessment of the event, the odds for pulling tokens of a higher rarity than gold seem to have improved. 2K is also offering more challenges that unlock tokens. But again, they tripled the difficulty of the grind from the last event, so I'm not going to celebrate these small but necessary changes too much.
The sad fact is that as long as we keep handing them money to purchase cards that become obsolete the second next year's game drops, 2K is going to keep charging us. And I'm aware as somebody that gets paid to write about it, I'm part of the sick economy. The only thing I will spend more time doing than complaining about NBA 2K this year is playing NBA 2K. The basketball experience under the hood is fun, and that's very much what I try to focus on.