A guide to building the ‘Ultimate Team’ – FIFA 13: hints and tips
Words by: Jamie Tarren | Posted: 7 months ago | Filed under: Achievements & Guides.
FIFA’s Ultimate Team has most certainly become one of the stand out features of the franchise. There’s nothing more satisfying than spending your precious money on virtual gold packs containing a mixture of players and contract cards, without knowing what you’re going to get. I hate to say this, but it almost brings me back to the days of Pokémon cards and spending all of my pocket-money on a new pack each week.
Chemistry
This is something the commentators will mention in every year’s edition of Ultimate Team and it’s certainly worth taking notice of. I’m not going to patronise you, as the chances are you already know what chemistry is and how to build it up. Let’s just say if you stick to building a team consisting of the same nationality, then you’ll more than likely gain 100 chemistry – providing the players prefer the formation and the position they’re playing in.
The main area you may want to concentrate on are the chemistry lines, as green is perfect and red is disjointed. Orange lines signal a slight bond between players, for example one player might not like the position or formation you play them in, so you’ll need to address this. As much as I enjoy Ultimate Team, chemistry can really hinder how well your team plays, so it’s worth taking notice of those lines and the chemistry total.
Passing and pace
A lot of the FIFA 13 community will tell you that this year’s title isn’t about using skills anymore, whereas FIFA 12 tended to involve the use of skill moves to get around defenders. After doing a bit of research and experimenting with various teams, it appears that players with a high passing rating are key to a good attack. You probably noticed from launch day, that the passing has been significantly improved from last year, which means you can now string together fast attacking moves towards your opponent’s goal.
Another vital attribute to have is pace, which will help you to get round the back of defenders with ease. Wingers obviously need pace, but it’s also useful to have fast left and right backs, otherwise you’ll find yourself open down the wings when trying to defend. At the moment I’m using Armero from Udinese as my left back and he’s more than capable of keeping up with wingers because he has 88 pace. It’s completely up to you who you pick, but make sure they have a pace rating of 80+.
If you’re looking for the fastest wingers look at Walcott (Arsenal), Biabany (Parma) and Pitroipa (Stade Rennais). There’s plenty of other fast wingers out there, but these are the quickest in the game.
Formations
There’s no winning formation on FIFA 13, but try to think how you play each game. For example, I like to play with a fast passing tempo and I’m always looking for a killer ball to send one of my attackers through on goal. Therefore my formation is quite narrow with a 4-1-2-1-2, so I have Fabregas as my central attacking midfielder to thread the passes through to my strikers.
If you have a player such as Andy Carroll, who will win a lot of headers, it might be worth using a formation with one striker and two wingers, whilst also having a right and left midfielder. Your lone striker is the one who will be scoring all of the goals with their head and maybe a few volleys, but you want to single him out in the box, so avoid having too many players running in there.
Boosts
Personally I’m not a fan of the booster cards you can get for players, but I understand why people use them because they can be really useful for boosting the stats of players. If you want a striker that can score you lots of goals, then applying a +15 shooting card could prove to be the difference. You can also get defending and heading boosts if you want to stop conceding goals or if you want to score more goals from corners.
The market
It’s always worth checking the auctions constantly, as you never know when you might spot a bargain. Make full use of the filters such as the maximum buy now and maximum starting price, as this will help you keep the price down. When you’re searching for players, most people don’t go through the pages, so always check the later pages for possible bargains.
If you’re selling players, make sure you check the price of the player before listing them up. This also goes for consumable cards such as formations and contracts. I’ve had so many formation cards in packs, that sometimes I forget to check their value and just discard them. Rare cards usually sell for a couple of hundred coins, so there’s a small profit to be made there.
Contracts
Thankfully, FIFA 13 isn’t like FIFA 09, where you lose your players once their contracts run dry. However, you still need to keep on top of these and make sure you have a wealthy stock of them in your consumables pile. I probably have about 30 or 40 gold contract cards and I use them on any player that drops below 20 games remaining. It might seem a bit obsessive, but at least I don’t have to worry about losing a player until I have enough coins to buy more contracts.
Have fun!
Finally, don’t forget to have fun with your teams. It’s not always about building the best gold team out there with 100 chemistry. You should try making some teams consisting of bronze and silver players or why not even make a team consisting of the biggest personalities in football. I’m sure Balotelli and Barton would make it in there somewhere.
About Jamie Tarren
Jamie is the Assistant Editor for Xboxer360. He shares a passion for gaming and will happily play most genres. He also likes to wear sunglasses, both inside and outside to look cool.
