The cities still in the deck
What Cities Hold scattered its rarest pieces at random through the mint. I'm a stats major. I counted what was left, saw the best 1-of-1s hadn't surfaced yet, and minted two of them.
SIGMA-X →
SigmaX makes light. He works out of India, a resident of the 8NAP platform, and his cityscapes glow like a skyline seen through tired, happy eyes. What Cities Hold was a generative drop: every mint an unrepeatable 1-of-1, the rarest ones scattered through the run like face cards in a shuffled deck.
The math
Here is the part I am a little too pleased about. I studied statistics in school. When I looked at What Cities Hold partway through the mint, I could see which of the special pieces had already surfaced and which had not, and roughly how many mints were left. That is just a deck with cards removed, and you can count what is still in it. I said it plainly at the time: there were more 1-of-1s still available in the mint. So I ran the odds, decided the moment was better than it looked to anyone not counting, and I minted.
Two cities
It worked. I caught two of the rarest pieces in the collection. One of them, Beverly Hills, Arrival at the Dream, was featured in 24 Hours of Art. Another was a bridge I know in my body, and I told SigmaX exactly why: so many late nights driving across that bridge in the Bay Area that the piece stopped being a picture and became a memory. DeltaSauce is the one who showed me his work first, on a day before one of Delta's own big drops. I owe him that introduction.
Why it is here
I collect on feeling, almost always. This is the one time I collected on arithmetic, and it is one of my favorite calls I have made in this whole space. What Cities Hold is where a statistics degree and a love of light ended up in the same wallet. Twenty-two of SigmaX's pieces live here now. Start with the cities and let them glow.