Tips for Building Your Ultimate Team - BlyGilmore's Blog

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Tips for Building Your Ultimate Team Stuck

Posted on April 8, 2009 at 12:00 PM.

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So over the weekend I overdosed on Ultimate Team, playing a pretty ridiculous number of games - making sure to get my money's worth from the expansion.

Below are a few tips I thought I would share - often learned by screwing the pouch on something and figuring them out the hard way.

- Early on in your adventure, do some thinking about what your ideal team might look like, especially which star players you would like to have.

Then go out and find those players on the trade floor and make note of their vital information - prefered position, ideal formation and nationality.

Moving forward, keep that information in mind and begin building your team around those players. When you get your final piece of the puzzle, doing it this way will ensure you can just plug them in and be ready to go. Instead of wasting money building a completely different team, getting your favorite player and then needing to scrap everything to build around them.

So if you know you want Fernando Torres as your striker, once you start getting gold players, begin building your team with Spanish forwards.

- Do the same with Managers. The big thing here is to find out what formation they prefer and either start building a team for that formation, or make sure to get and save a manager trading card for the formation you want to play. Also make note of the Manager's nationality and try to get players from the same country whenever possible.

In the meantime, you also want to find interim Managers that fit the same mold, or nearly the same mold.

- Silver packs are largely a waste of coins. You are much better off buying Bronze packs until you have a full team and a bunch of contract cards and then saving up for the gold packs.

Within a week or so all of your silver players are going to be gone regardless, and honestly the silver contract cards aren't that much more valuable for gold players. You are better off buying five bronze packs for the one silver pack.

- So in regard to packs, the prevailing theory is to save for gold packs but also spend money on bronze packs when you are getting low on contract cards.

- If you are going to be playing a formation like the 4-4-2 with two strikers, resist the urge to make your created player a striker.

The biggest strength of your created player is his editability. At any time you can change both his position and his nationality, letting you move him around and edit him to get a chemistry boost.

Again, planning here about your final picture helps a lot. If you know who you want for different positions, you can put your created player in a spot where he won't be threatened by your larger plans.

- On your coaching staff, all you really need is a manager, head coach and goalie coach. Contract cards are just too valuable to also be holding fitness or injury cards at the same time.

- You can manage your teams fitness instead by playing your reserves 1 out of every 4 games. Doing so should ensure your starters never fall below 85 fitness and remain relatively healthy. Injuries you'll just have to deal with by building a team that can change pieces and still be effective.

- Because your reserves will be playing a number of games, you really need to be building two teams at the same time. Almost a varsity team and a junior varsity, so you can swap players out position for position.

- I have actually had pretty good success playing my B team in the opening around of a tournament. If you lose, you can just start the tourney up again and still get coins as if you had just done a pickup game. If you win you have saved your starters one games worth of contracts.

- You will quickly find one of the most valuable things in this game is contracts. By playing your reserves regularly you'll use their vital contract time and save yourself contract cards you can use on your starters.

- Along the same lines, try to time the purchase of gold packs, or players on the trade floor, with when you have reserves coming up for contract renewal. If you can swap a reserve on your roster for a better player before using a contract card, its a double win.

- Try to resist using substitutes, and build your team so at most you are using one (either a key defensive or key offensive swap depending on the situation).

Every time you sub you are using two games worth of contracts for one actual game. If you use all of your subs, you are using six games worth of subs when you could have used only three. Over time, that is huge.

- Value player alert! I snagged Mascherano yesterday, the Argentian, CDM who plays for Liverpool, for 150 coins.

At first glance he isn't all that impressive. At 78 overall, he's a marginal gold players (gold starts at 76 overall) who didn't fit my scheme. But I wanted a Liverpool player on the squad.

His value, however, is in his defensive rating. I have a few stand out defenders on my squad (my back line is Capdevilla, Bourbon, Juan and Ramos with Bellati in reserve) and Mascherno had the third highest defensive rating on the team (around an 85).

This makes him a great late substitution at midfield when you are defending a lead.

- Time for some trading tips. First, always put a buyout. If you need to, do some research and find out what a card is likely to go for and place that as the buy out.

People are impulse buyers and few have the discipline to wait a day to potentially get a card for 500 - especially if they can just pay 1,500 now. Especially for contracts and injury cards - you might have somebody on the hook who needs to renew their big gun, or heal him up, and they're willing to pay to make it happen.

- Use the 5 day option. Right now it isn't clear how the cards are sorted, but they certainly aren't sorted based on when the trade expires. So the longer your card is out there, the better chance somebody will see it and buy it. If they change the sorting option, then it will be better to use either the two hour or 1 day option - since your card will more frequently be up front and not buried.

- Here's a big one. And when you speak of me, speak well.

There are a ton of gold players, badges and team jerseys you will be able to buy for 150 to 250. If you haven't already added these to your collection, you can do so and receive between 450 and 490 coins. No that isn't a typo. You can spend 150, win the auction and make 300 coins. Do that 17 times and its a free gold pack.

- Along the same lines, be on the lookout for potentially underpriced items. Badges and kits are big ones here. If you can find the badge and kit of a big team for cheap, you can often sell it for more.

Yesterday I bought a Barcalona badge for 250 (it was an expiring trade with no buyout) and sold it within a couple of hours for 2,000 (5 day auction - only Barca badge on at the time with a buyout).