My newest hobby is trading on Fifa Ultimate Team and Squad Building on there, so I will try and explain some fundamentals I have learnt recently, from some great accounts such as @TomFut88 who has really helped me to understand a lot.
When starting off with low coins, use the Bronze Pack Method to cycle through the current Player Squad Building Challenges (SBC’s) available as even if the player(s) aren’t useful to you, you can always trade them in an SBC and start the cycle again.
The Bronze Pack Method effectively is just buying bronze packs, quick selling any consumable or club item not of use, keeping non SBC league players for upgrades and selling the ones that are from leagues with an SBC. What I tend to do is focus on one League SBC at once so for example MLS. So if I opened a bronze pack, any MLS player I got, I would keep. Any players from other SBC Leagues I would sell, undercutting the lowest buy now for a quick sale. Any other player I would keep and then quick sell anything else. The idea is that this would slowly build up your players from the MLS making the SBC cheaper to complete in the long run as the coins made from sales and quick selling over time should see you break even or profit on the cost to open packs. You can then put all bronzes that are none SBC into Bronze Upgrades to get 2 Silver Players that are hopefully SBC League based, but if not eventually when it all adds up, you put all of the useless ones into Silver Upgrades to get 3 Gold Players which in time will, worst-case scenario, build your club up and again pick up some useful cards for SBC Leagues.
Another way to approach doing the League SBC’s is to focus on the teams with the best pack rewards and work your way down, with the hope that the better packs give you players to use in other teams/leagues or better still a high rated/high cost player to sell and profit, or that is useable in your teams.
Investments and flips are key to making coins on the game and should be done regularly. For example, if you know a SBC is coming out with a high rated requirement, if you stock up on high rated players you can sell for a nice markup in the height of the SBC release when everyone is clambering for them on the transfer market. Another example investment is to purchase players likely to be in that week’s Marquee Matchups as if you correctly guess the games and players from the teams you would almost certainly make profit on listing the players for inflated prices when they are released. Finally look to try and buy commonly purchased players out of promo and SBC hype and list them during, as supply and demand will apply, and they will naturally be worth more due to being more in demand.
An example of a flip is simply buying a player at lowest bid now and listing for profit at a higher price on buy now as lazy people will just instantly get the buy now to avoid waiting and bidding. So you can make a nice profit per sale as long as you take EA Coin tax into account. 82s and 83s are good for this as they are commonly used, especially if in popular leagues. Another way to flip is to purchase players that are in the Team of The Week (TOTW) base card for lowest bid price and list them for buy now higher as they currently wont be in packs due to their TOTW version being so, so their will be a higher demand. An example of this was Tammy Abraham. When he was in the TOTW you could bid on his basic gold card for 700 coins and list at 1.2k buy now for an instant sale making a 500 coin profit per card, less 60 for EA’s 5% Tax.
I really enjoy Squad Building as I love the puzzle solving element of it. I have only just recently understood how chemistry works however. The basics of any team is to have 100 Chem and have a Yellow or Green line connecting every player but you can get away with the occasional Red line as long as for every Red line you have a Green line connected to balance it up. Ideally you want every player on 10 Chem but you can afford to be 10 chem short across the team and still hit 100. But of course the lower a players individual chemistry is, the worse they will perform and the less benefit you will get from any chem style attached. The best and most fun teams are multiple leagues and nations combined, still achieving 100 chemistry. Icons are worth their weight in gold as they will yellow link to any player and green to any of the same nation so are a great puzzle piece to link two completely contrasting other players together. Substitutes are always 5 chemistry by default. However any player that started a game will have the same chemistry no matter where his position is changed in play. This is why so many people change tactics after kick off in a match, because their pre game formation was likely just to achieve perfect chemistry and not how they want to set up in game. This is why many people make strikers centre mids and vice versa so it gets them
the best possible pre match chemistry that will carry into the match regardless of what position they are then swapped to play in.
Something I plan to do on next years game is to build 5 concept squads for the major leagues as soon as it is released and basically put the best player available at that time in the position and just upgrade it over time as special and promo cards come out through the season. I try to aim to get full teams of untradeable Promo players either through objectives, SBC’s or packed as they will all be First Owned which is good for objectives and it keeps as many coins as possible spendable for trading.
When it comes to rewards from Rivals if you actually play the matches. I was taught to always take untradeables options ahead of coins and tradeables as you can always make coins through trading and you get twice as many packs through taking untradeables which worst case can just go into SBC’s anyway if no immediate use to you.
Something I struggle with but thats valuable advice is that not all SBC’s will be worth doing when you consider what you put in vs what you could get out. I love a pack gamble as much as the next guy but sometimes you have to look at it logically and assess.
Hope this gives a really basic guide to trading and how to build squads on Ultimate Team. I really like trading on UT as you can effectively do it without spending a penny more than the initial game cost and just investing time so if you have that luxury it can be a fun hobby.
The Percentage Game 