With Madden NFL 26 now freely available to gamers without premium access, the Madden Ultimate Team mode is ready to kick into full gear. If you’re just getting started with Ultimate Team it can be a lot to wrap your head around, and you may find yourself wondering what to do to make the process of building a team that you can win with as quick and easy as possible. These are ten key tips to improve your experience with this online mode.
How Does Madden NFL 26 Ultimate Team Work?
In Madden NFL 26 Ultimate Team, you don’t control a single real-world team, but instead an online team made of players you gather from teams and times that cover the full breadth of the NFL. The more you play, the more access to high-quality cards you gain, allowing you to steadily improve the overall ability of your team with new players and upgrades. Over time, this allows you to transform your team of Just a Guy-level players in your starting squad into a unit of studs and legends ready to bring havoc to opposing teams around the world.
Buying & Selling Tips For Madden NFL 26 Ultimate Team
The player market is the best way to target specific players or fill specific needs on your team due to the ability to not leave anything up to chance. Similarly, there can be great value earned by smart selling on the open exchange. Here’s what you need to know about buying and selling in MUT:
- Spend Real Money Responsibly: As always with online freemium games like Ultimate Team modes, the option to attempt to buy your way to success is always there with MUT. While there’s nothing wrong with spending money responsibly on credits to improve your team if it will make your experience more enjoyable, only do so with money you are comfortable spending on a game you will likely be swapping out for the next release within the year, as you can have plenty of fun and success online for free.
- Open Before You Buy: If you have packs in your reserves waiting to be opened, always do so before making any other decisions about buying, selling, or trading in cards. Your options within a pack are significantly more limited than when going to the open market, so it’s beneficial to see what any packs you own have to offer before spending your coins. This helps ensure you don’t spend big on a player only to draw a card from a pack that would have changed your priorities had you known.
- Sell Now, Buy Later: On both the macro and micro level, it’s always better to be buying early and selling late. This means both at the start of a new edition of Madden NFL, like we are in right now, and when new cards drop. Values on cards are at their peak when they are new because new cards haven’t dropped to decrease their relative power and because the hot new card will keep showing up for players in the weeks ahead, increasing its supply and lowering the value over time. Often, you can even cash in on a card now, then buy a copy in a few weeks for significantly less, effectively giving you a glut of coins in exchange for just a short period of not having access to the player, as if you’d loaned him out for a huge payday.
Economy Generation Tips For Madden NFL 26 Ultimate Team
If you want to improve your team in Ultimate Team, you need to be adding to it early and often through player and perk acquisition. This can be a bit confusing for new players as online modes now feature so many currencies and modes and ways to earn the former in the latter, but it’s critical. Here is what to keep in mind to build your team’s resources as effectively as possible:
- Complete the Solo Modes: While Ultimate Team modes are primarily about online play, EA also sets them up in a way that it’s beneficial to get into the offline solo game modes, too. Completing solo modes can help you rack up the currency you need to buy, unlock packs and perks directly through your achievements, and help you towards clearing out objectives. The more resources you have at your disposal, the stronger team you can build, so don’t let the chance to gather through solo play pass you by.
- Focus on Field Passes: The field pass rewards can be an excellent way to gather new resources for your team, so always be sure that you’re maximizing your payoff from them as much as possible. If you are looking to spend money on your team, the premium field pass often provides some of the best value for your real-world buck. Ensuring you then fully utilize the benefits of that pass can help you quickly generate new quality players for your lineup to get your team performing at its peak.
- Use Exchanges For Low-Rated Gold Cards: Not every gold card you get is worth loads of virtual currency, and if you find yourself with golds that are too lowly-rated to get into the lineup, you may be looking to move them. While quickselling is an option, for gold cards with low value in the hundreds you are often better served using exchanges to get higher rated options and looking to find yourself a lower-gold that still carries high value on the market which you can then choose to sell for significantly more than you would have gotten from hawking the cards that got you it.
Team Building Tips For Madden NFL 26 Ultimate Team
Roster construction is the heart of the MUT experience and the engine that will drive your team to success or leave you sputtering along through a string of defeats. Keep these tips in mind as you build your team to create a winning lineup you can take to the top:
- Your Favorite Team Matters: When selecting your favorite team for a mode that is all about getting randomly drawn players from around the league and through the eras, it may seem like an inconsequential decision, but it will impact your MUT experience. The team you select decides what’s going on in the “Playbooks & Visuals” section of the MUT center, meaning how you look, where you play, and the coaching and playbooks available to you at the start come from the team you pick.
- Pay Attention to Chemistry: When looking for ways to improve your team along the margins, chemistry can be a critical tool to keep in mind. Higher team chemistry can provide stat boosts, while the use of team chemistry cards can help you to get players the little boosts they need to excel on the field without needing to worry about choosing someone who isn’t your best player for a position.
- Use Generate Best Lineup For Help: Getting a handle on all the players on your team can be a handful for a new player, particularly as EA walks you through a tornado of packs to open and modes to explore, where it can be easy to lose track of who you have and what your strengths and weaknesses are. Clicking “Generate Best Lineup” allows you to quickly have your strongest players plugged in so you don’t miss anyone, and customization options within the setting let you tweak to just cover specific units or spots that need filling so you can use it without disrupting any lineup choices you’re happy with.
- Boost With Strategy Cards: Using strategy cards is an excellent way to improve your team in a simple way. Offering boosts to stats for players across a unit, strategy cards mean you can apply attribute bumps that hit your team regardless of its current level or composition so a good strategy card can remain an important part of your team building for a long time until something better comes in to replace it, no matter who you are playing in that unit or how good they are.
That wraps up our tips for finding success in Madden NFL 26 Ultimate Team, but the best advice you can get is to get on and get playing. The only way to get used to succeeding with the players you have is to get reps on the field with them, so find a mode that appeals to you and toss on your virtual pads for a game.
