MongoDB Hashed Shard Keys Selection
Why not shard on a custom _id value since it's guaranteed to be unique? With the size around 1,000 an index on playerId should allow for good performance as well.

Still do some testing of course because it can still vary based on number of shards and overall size of the collection.



Found a video I was looking for at the time from the Mongo University M102 course: Cardinality &amp; Monotonic Shard Keys, which provides some more insight.