Making The Most Out Of Happy Hour

Regular readers may have gathered that I think packs are poor value and buying them in great quantities is not the most effective way of squad building in Ultimate Team. With that in mind, you may be surprised to hear that I look forward to the regular happy hour announcements. This is not because I will be spending my hard earned coins on the special offers, in fact these often appear to be even worse value than the regular packs.

No, I like happy hour because it gives traders a great opportunity to make more coins

Pack purchases go through the roof during happy hour, and whilst every Ultimate Team player buying a pack is hoping to grab an In Form card, these are extremely rare and the bulk of buyers will end up with cards they do not want.

These cards will end up in the auction house very quickly. The scale of pack opening during happy hour can result in a  glut of cards in the Auvtion House which means that during the hour and for the remainder of that evening, it is a buyers market. This method is best suited for those with plenty of coins who will not miss having them tied up for a few hours, as you will need to wait for the opportunity to sell at a profit.

The amount of cards on the market means that in some cases cards will go uncontested to the first bidder. Bid on rare gold cards at 600 coins and you will often win the card and be able to make a small profit through the quick sale function.

However if you know your player values you can look at some of the card that sell well above their quick sale value. During Happy Hour when the market is flooded, these cards will not reach there usual premium and can be picked up for several hundred coins cheaper. The types of cards we are looking at here are generally creative and attacking players, who play for the more prominent teams in the Premier League, La Liga, Serie A or Bundesliga. There are exceptions to these, but if you try to learn the values of key players in these leagues, you will be well set to catch a bargain.

As I said earlier this technique does tie up your coins for a short while, as we need to allow the market to return to normal in order to maximise our profit. After Happy Hour the market may not return to normal until the following day. Once normality returns to the market, list the cards and watch the profits roll in,

Contracts Cup

Further to the previous post about making the most of contracts, you can win a mini-gold contracts pack and 1,500 coins by winning the offline version of the Contracts Cup. Although you are limited to a maximum team rating of 4 stars, and the opposition I encountered included Man Utd and Real Madrid, it isn't too difficult to win this trophy at many players will be able to do this at the first attempt. Use lower rated gold players to stay under the maximum star rating.

Increasing Contract Lengths

 

As Ultimate Team evolves over the course of the game, players start to assemble the players and formations that they require. The result of this is that when a card runs out of contracts, more players will now be looking at issuing the card with a new contract rather than replacing the card.

You may have noticed the effect of this if you have recently tried to buy contracts at auction. You can expect to pay around 600 coins for a rare gold contract card which is double the amount that they could be picked up for earlier in the game.

You may not be able to get the contract cards any cheaper, but you can get more games out of your contracts if you have sufficient managers in your club with the appropriate attributes.

Each manager has two attributes, contract and team talks followed by a percentage (modifier). Many of the lesser managers will have a percentage of 0 for contracts and are of no use for extending contracts. But the majority of rare managers will have this attribute (I say majority, as I have seen one manager card, R.La Volpe of Argentina that is rare but does not have a contract modifier)

The rare gold managers have a 3% modifier, silver 2% and bronze 1%

A 3% increase on a 28 game contract is going to have no effect as it, however the modifier effect is based on managers in your club, not just the one selected to take charge of the team. Therefore, hypothetically you could collect enough managers to have the total modifier reach 100 to effectively double the length of any contracts that you assign.

Is this cost effective though? Maybe not to chase all the managers to get a 100% modifier, but several rare gold managers can be picked up for around 400 coins so it is conceivable that you could increase the length of any contracts you assign by a third for as little as 4000 coins. see picture below for the effect of having these managers has on applying a contract.

This strategy is worthwhile for those who play a lot of games as you will have saved the additional outlay by the time you assign your 20^th rare contract card*

Weather you decide to follow this strategy or not is up to you, but it may be worthwhile holding on to any manager cards that you get as those modifiers soon add up.

 

*Based on 600 coins a card and 400 coins per gold

Trading - Buy It Now

The ability to include a Buy It Now (BIN) price on an auction offers a great opportunity to make small repeated profits by re-selling in the Auction House.

The strategy I use is to bid on none rare gold players at 300 coins. The players I select for this are ones that play at 6 of the biggest Barclays Premier League clubs, or regular England Internationals. There are some players from outside the Premier League that I will bid on but the popularity of this league makes it easier to make a profit on those players.

Ther are also some rare cards that also fall into this category that can be picked up for 600 coins and regularly sold at a profit in the auction house, however for now I am going to concentrate on the none rare gold cards.

Once I have selected the players I am going to bid on I will search on the details with a maximum price of 250 coins. I will bid on all the available cards at 300 coins. I woulnt expect to win all of these players, which is a good sign as it means that there is a good possibility that they can be sold at a decent profit, and if they don't sell after a few auctions selling through the quick sale function will still record a small profit.

With any cards that I do win, I send them to my trade pile and list for auction. To ensure I do not make any losses I start the auction at 350 coins, but by adding a sensible BIN price I can often make a decent profit. The price I set the BIN at will depend on many factors. I usually set them at 500 coins, but if a card gets sanpped up quickly I will list that card for more next time.

I always list the cards for 1 hour, so if they don't sell first time I will list them several times, and would expect them to sell eventually.

If a card has no contracts I may list at 450, if they have a high number of contracts I will go higher.
Other factors to consider are formations, so I may put a 4-4-2 or 4-1-2-1-2 card slightly higher than others.

The beauty of the BIN function is that players may be looking for a particular card to use in a game straight away and waiting an hour to pick the card up for slightly less may not appeal to them. Alternatively they may want to secure the card they want for a few extra coins and not risk being outbid. There are many reasons why players will be prepared to pay over the odds for certain players but this will only happen though if the BIN is set at a realistic level. A none rare gold Premier League player with a rating of 80 could be picked up for 300 coins. Someone may pay 500 or 600 for this depending on other factors, but they are very unlikely to buy at 1,500, Setting the right BIN price is key to making profits, as this is a strategy that can be repeated again and again and those profits can really start to add up quite quickly.

Happy Trading

Player Upgrades

EA have announced the first set of player upgrades and these players should start appearing in packs over the coming days. Keep an eye out for these players as they may be put on the auction at prices based on the old ratings so there may be a few bargains out there

Player           Old Rating    New Rating   Position   Club
Falcao           88                 89                   ST           At.Madrid
Turan            84                 86                   CAM       At.Madrid
Adler             81                84                   GK          Hamburg
Yilmaz          78                 82                   ST           Galatasaray
Benat            79                 82                   CM          Real Betis
Joaquin         80                 82                   RM          Malaga
Valbuena      80                 82                   CAM       Olympique Marsielle
El Shaarawy 76                 81                   LW          Milan
Cavalieri       78                81                   GK           Fluminense
Asamoah.K   79                81                   LM          Juventus
Candreva      77                80                    RM          Lazio
Ulreich          78                80                   GK          VfB Stuttgart
N'Koulou      78                80                    CB          Olympic Marsielle
Sandro          78                80                    CDM       Tottenham Hotspur
Martins         75                79                    ST           Levante
Barcos           75               79                    ST           Palmeiras
Caballero      76                79                    GK         Malaga
Vela              77                79                    RW         Real Sociedad
Pizarro          76                78                    CM         Fiorentina
dos Santos    75                78                    LM         Malaga
Martinez       75                78                    CDM      Rayo Vallecano
Bonaventura 75                78                    LM         Atalanta
Ciani             76                78                    CB          Lazio
Vlaar            76                 78                    CB          Aston Villa
Begovic         76               78                    GK         Stoke
Lens              76                78                    RW        PSV
Tello             76                78                    LW         Barcelona
Pogba            72                77                   CDM      Juventus
Michu           75                77                    CF          Swansea
Sterling         69                74                   LW         Liverpool
Manucho       64                73                   ST          Real Valladolid
Khelifa          68                70                   ST          Evian
Hosiner         65                70                   ST          Austria Wien         

Trading
 

I have delayed writing this article as prices in the Auction House have been depressed since the release of the Team of the Year (TOTY). It would appear that the chance to obtain TOTY players in packs resulted in a mass sell off of player cards to fund pack purchases. The result of this was that player trade values were much lower than previously and this presented a few difficulties for those of us trying to make additional coins by trading

In the last few days though, the market has appeared to return to normality. Although prices are not reaching there pre TOTY levels (with a few exceptions) the increase has been sufficient for the smart trader to make a profit.

When we first started building our coin fund, we were looking for players that we could use the quick sell function to sell at a small profit. However this process is slow but necessary in order to build or coin fund to allow us to move to the next stage.

We are now going to look for players that regularly sell for higher than there quick sell value. Because of this we are taking a risk that if we cannot re-sell the player at auction, we will make a loss. Because of this, it is vital that we do our research to ascertain the correct market value for the player before we start to buy.

When we were bidding on players at below the quick sell value, you will have noticed that there were players that we would regularly be outbid on. These are the type of players we should be looking at to start with as we know they regularly sell for more than the re-sell value. I will not be naming individual players to go for as that would very quickly distort the trade price making this advice less effective, but I will advise on the types of players you should be looking for.

Ideally you will have built a fund of around 20,000 coins to trade with, however if you have more coins than that, you can start going for higher value players where greater margins can be made (although the risks are greater too)

To start with I would be looking at Gold Rare cards rated high 70’s to low 80’s, full internationals, with high profile clubs. Attacking players also tend to offer better trading opportunities, although these are just some loose guidance to help you find trading opportunities. Once you find a potential opportunity, I recommend watching a number of auctions on that player to find the range of prices the player sells for.

You need to find a player with a good range of prices as we are looking to buy at the lower end of the range and sell for more. We also have to take into account the 5% EA deduct from every Auction House sale. If we sell a card for 1,000 coins we will only receive 950 coins as the other 50 will be deducted.

So having watched a player, we can see the range of prices. For example, we may find a player that always sells for at least 800 coins, but will often sell for more, and regularly sell for over 1,000. This presents our trading opportunity

Although there are factors that influence player value such as formation or number of contracts, there are sufficient gamers that will buy there player they want irrespective of formation, and this is where our potential to make a profit arises.

We have found our player and decided that his lower value is 800 coins. We now do a search on the player and bid on every card available at 800 coins (depending on the player I sometimes don’t bid on players who have no contracts left as these can sometimes be harder to sell). We bid on every card at 800, and if we are outbid that is not a problem.

With a fund of 20,000 coins we could make 25 bids of 800 assuming there are that many cards available in the auction house. If we have done our research correctly we should win a handful of these auctions. If we win most of them, we have clearly overpaid for the player and will struggle to re-sell at a profit. Likewise if we do not win any of the players, we have undervalued that particular player

Assuming we win say 5 of the 25 auctions, we have probably got our pitch just right. We should then list these vehicles at the Auction House at a higher value. Again look at the cards that you have been outbid on to see what price these should be re-listed at. If you list them too high, they may not sell, but you can always re-list slightly lower until the do go.

For our 5 cards that we bought at 800 coins, I might list them at a start price of 1,000. If a couple sell but the rest don’t I wouldn’t worry too much, just re-list them at the same price. Even if it takes three or four auctions, I would expect them to sell eventually.

As we may have to list these items more than once, I would only put them on a 1 hour auction, as this allows us to re-list quickly if they fail to sell first time.

Although we have a start price of 1,000 it is possible that they could sell for more than that but assuming they all go for 1,000, that would be a profit of 150 per card after EA deduction, and a total profit of 750 over the five cards.

As you can see, if you find the right players, this is a much more effective way of making coins quickly, providing we choose the right players in the first place.

Want To Try A New Formation?

Everyone has there own favourite formation, but do you know if a different set up could improve your game? You may be surprised to find that it is possible to put a decent side together relitavely cheaply. I am an advocate of the 4-1-2-1-2 formation, but on FIFA 13 the 3-5-2 formation is becoming very popular. To find out if it was any good I set about putting a team together.I decided on putting a team together from the Portugese League. As this is not my main team I did not want to be wasting any coins on it, so I set about bidding for gold players for 300 coins (600 for rares). As you can see below, I have built a team playing 3-5-2 with 100 chemistry, the total cost of the starting 11 being 4650 coins. The beauty of building the team like this is, after playing a few games, if you decide the formation is not for you, the players can be sold through the quick sell function for a small profit. Or if you do like the formation, you can carry on building the team from a solid foundation.