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