When theymos first recruited me, my original allocation was 50 merits. (I've heard that some start out with much less.) It does not surprise me that he wants to start out people low to test them out. Also, I believe Vod was relieved of his merit source duties at around the same time. Therefore there are 8 new merit sources. I'm not certain how high Vod's merit source allocation was. However, I suspect that his source allocation was at least 250.
Thank you, bones261. I forgot about Vod, so it means 8 new merit sources, with 20 monthly allocated merits for each of them in average. I edited my above post.