 Hey guys, it's Nate, aka The Foot Account, and welcome back to the channel. Today we're talking about buying cards and specifically an investment that so many people are going to be making right now. And through the rest of this week, should you be making it as well? We're going to talk about that today, some market-related content. And also, we had yet again another EA mistake with Road to the Final Cards dropped yesterday in the mini-release. Added to the list of things that have been going on, but hopefully we get compensation today for one of those mistakes that happened last week. And it's been over a week now, so maybe we'll be getting some of those player picks back from EA today. We'll talk about that in the video today and cover everything that's going on in this game. If you're excited for it, drop a thumbs up and subscribe if you're new. Let's go to SBCs because that's where the action was yesterday. Of course, we had a daily SBC added to the list of all the challenges. The winning strategy, SBC was dropped pretty mid-pack, premium and gold-pack. But if you're doing all of these to get all the completions and the objectives to get those packs, it is a must-do. It's very cheap, again, 3,000 coins, so that is nice to have. That's kind of like that in the 85-plus player pick. Refreshing is kind of what EA is trying to keep the daily login push type of grind, I think, going. And I think we'll just have fun this entire week and do the 85-plus player pick on each of the videos just in case we get something cool. Because, well, we didn't this time, but my club has a bunch of 84s still left over from Team of the Year. And that's when I put those 84s into because why not? So that player pick was mid. I have an 83x5 from objectives, which I'll probably just save for a little bit so we can keep moving through things. But yeah, that was the SBC content yesterday. The refresh of the 84x11, which we highlighted in yesterday's video as well. Really interesting. Mine also says it's going to refresh in 12 hours. I don't know if that's accurate or not. We'll see. But I do kind of want to get this done just because that is not an upgrade SBC that's around too often. And yeah, packing a road to the final wouldn't be the worst thing ever. So let's go to the big SBC that dropped yesterday. That was an upgrade pack. It was the icon player pick, one of four. So it's the same pick that we had, but they made it one of four. And it's the same price, too. 86, 86, 87, the team of the week. But with 86s and 87s being basically capped prices. So most of them are extinct on the market. Guys, this SBC is a very expensive SBC. And it's kind of like we have to shift our thinking. That's one of the things I wanted to talk about with yesterday's content and the SBCs right now is we're coming out of team of the year where we were able to do like everything from all the packs that we opened. We had so much fodder, even though the pack weight wasn't good. We had so many 83s, 4s, 5s to be able to craft SBCs, upgrade packs to get more fodder, right? Now we're kind of back into the normal part of where we think about our clubs is, you know, being careful with the cards that we have and the fodder that we have, be careful with the SBCs that we do because sometimes SBCs just aren't worth it. I did all the icon player picks or all but one last week, but this one I think I'm staying away from just because I don't want to shell out 420,000 coins when 87s are 24,000 coins apiece, 88s are up, 85s are up big, 86 is the ones that aren't capped and extinct on the market. They're up big as well, 21,000 coins. Some of the cheapest 86s are in form and special cards because EA won't update these price ranges before they drop SBCs like this and require a lot of this fodder. So that's why I'm being careful. A lot of SBCs right now, again, if you take a look at the player SBCs, it's just expensive to get stuff done with anything that is like 85 rated and above. All those squads for SBCs are really more expensive than they should be. EA is trying to drain a lot of coins off this game post-team of the year 100%. If you have fodder, I mean, pan, it is just so high. I feel like it's going to end up dropping this weekend, but it's probably going to stay at least up there during the week this week with not a lot of packs being opened and not really a ton of tradeable supply. So that's the player pick. Do it at your own risk. If you want to do it, go for it. Just be careful with those coins again. I think that's something that we have to be careful with. And I would say the same about this Thaltora Martinez. Good SBC, right? WDynamic Image, two playstyle pluses, although I would argue the Flare playstyle plus is probably the least useful one in the game, but he has technical plus, which almost makes up for that. He's also got Quick Step and Trivella. No scoring playstyles though in February for a 90 rated. I mean, it is a live card, but this SBC is coming in at around 400,000 coins and it's fairly upvoted, right? I would give this like a 7 out of 10 rating. Like the card itself has a lot of upvotes on it, thumbs up. I think if you're running a Serie A team, especially if you need some interlinks or if you're backing Inter to go far in a Champions League, this is a decent SBC. I think if you had to decide between Kimmich and this one though, I think Kimmich is the clear play. I think that one's definitely more of a must do SBC for the, I mean, you would think higher potential for the upgrade the link city has with other cards that have been released recently. So this one for me is a step down from Kimmich, but it's definitely not bad. Any card with two playstyle plus is cool. And this one is craftable for the number of squads it is as four SBCs and only 400,000 coins, some of the lower rated ones in there. And yes, definitely craftable. They're requiring a lot more team of the weeks right now. Like, I mean, you have a team of the requirement in two of these squads. Remember like the Alex, not the Alex Morgan and Kimmich actually has three team of the weeks. But guys, team of the weeks are just not moving on this market right now. It's the gold fodder that is moving. The team of the weeks are not just because everybody has team of the weeks for days in their club. I think team of the weeks were down, are they lower than 18K right now? How much are team of the week cards? 17,000 coins. They're just being required in SBCs, but they're just everywhere. Everybody has 83 plus picks that they did over team of the year. And it seems like EA almost up the pack weight on informs as well, which is not helping their prices rise. So at least for now, yes, EA is requiring those, but I still don't think I'm going to invest in it as of soon. It's the gold fodder that is going crazy. If you do talking about fodder just a little bit more, if you want to buy 83s and 84s, we mentioned that in yesterday's video. I still think you can get on bid for 84s. They're probably going to go higher today with 85s being 8,000 coins. That's a huge price discrepancy. 84s to 85s. I know the 84s are a lot more packable, but still 2,000 coins, they can go up. I mean, who knows? Maybe 2.7 to 3,000 coins. Like if I was buying 84s, try to get them on bid for like 1.8 to 1.9. Honestly, I think you'd be able to pay maybe lower than that if possible. And then listen for like 3k or 2.9, because I think you'll get lazy sales there as we have more of these SBCs, like the 85 plus pick, the 8411 refreshing during the week. That's 100% of thing that I would do in terms of the fodder. So that was basically the content that we had yesterday on this game. Nothing too crazy, but there was something that was really interesting with the mini-release. And we got more cards in packs, which was expected. It was the exact cards that we thought we were going to have, but EA added to their mistake list with this Mateo Genduzzi Road to the final card, guys, because Genduzzi used to play for Marseille in League 1, and he of course has transferred to Lazio now, but his card when it was first dropped into the game, which I believe he's been extinct at 190,000 coins the entire time, which is kind of crazy because on PC, he's 130k. And I mean, this is going to be a good card. He's going to be a cheap beast, but I feel like 190k extinct is a little crazy. And maybe there's an issue because they took the loading screen off of a game. I think he's still in packs. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, but I will say I am a little interested that when you load into the game right now, there's no Genduzzi that shows, there's no loading screen that shows, and maybe they did mess around with some, I don't know, but this card at first said League 1 and Lazio as the club. So really interesting kind of scenario there. And as I kind of look in the game right now, look for like a team list of the players that are in packs. It doesn't say anything about the road to the final team. Usually if you go over the transfers tab, they'll like show you the whole team that is in packs, and it doesn't right now. So that's a little interesting at least to me. Maybe there's something up with that graphic and stuff, but that's one of the new cards that was added to the game yesterday with a little EA mistake. I mean, that is a decent looking card. Not sure if they're going to go far in Champions League, but Genduzzi is always OP in this game. A lot of you guys know that. That's why there's a lot of hype for him, and he's 190K. And then the rest of the main of these cards, Lucy Bronze, Guru Riten, and there was one more, Gavardiol 900K for this card. Like, wow, that is really expensive for Gavardiol, man. I'm going to be honest. That is crazy expensive for plus ones and a couple plus twos over his radioactive card that is 100K. It's the live aspect and also the rarity of at least this card, that's making it be as expensive as it is. Now, let's talk about the point of this video today. We're talking about road to the final cards, guys, because these cards are some of the best investments every single time they get dropped into the game every single year, right? And it's because that they are live. It's because of this upgrade path that people have the opportunity to buy this card, put it in their club, and to see it get upgraded over time. There's always a ton of hype. Road to the finals almost always rise. Like, I'm pretty sure they rise every time. We can say that. Now, sometimes the buy points and the entry points are different on these cards, but live cards, especially this promo, since it's been in this game for so long, and it's for the marquee competitions in world football, it has a lot of hype, and the cards reflect that every single year. Now, some of the prices are already starting to buy, and I want to talk about, again, why the cards rise a little bit and how when we can invest, how I think it's going to go down this week. We ended up buying a couple of these cards, not many, but I've bought a couple. Now, there's two buy windows, as these prices have already started to rise, right? Let me give you an example of a card that's already getting invested in. It's Gianluigi Donaruma. Last night, I think I still have this on my transfer list, even, or transfer targets. Donaruma was like 66K, 65K on snipe. Right now, he has 80,000 coins. He has gone up a lot in price, and there's a reason for that. So, the reason that his card is going up and that some of these other cards are going up faster than others is because they have games first. And that's kind of something that you have to look into. PSG play on Wednesday, February 14th. The first games of the knockout rounds are next week, Tuesday and Wednesday, the 13th and 14th. There's Leipzig Madrid, Copenhagen City, Lazio Bayern, and PSG Real Sociedad. So, people see this as like, oh, this is probably one of the best investments because they have the opportunity to play first for him to get upgraded, to draw or win that first game, right? That's how the upgrade path works for champions and cards, and they have a really favorable matchup. So, it makes sense that Donaruma has started to go up, but since that card is going up, you look at the rest of the cards in this team, and you're starting to see their prices rise a little bit as well. Just to show you Donaruma, he was like 67K, and then boom, he just started going up because people started investing. Yes, you could say there's probably some natural demand there as well, but I really think people started investing in a lot of these cards. That's the cards that I would look at first. I would look at the cards that play the soonest, that could get upgraded the soonest from this first leg of the first knockout games, and I would also look at the cards that are already guaranteed upgrades because, guys, there's already cards that are guaranteed to get a plus one. Based off of the way the Europa League and the Conference League do the setup now, we're going to look at the Europa League example for this. They get a plus one in-form upgrade if they qualify for the round of 16, which also says includes automatic qualification. So just for example, Liverpool, Darwin Nunez, they are automatically in the round of 16 already since they won their group. They're in. This Darwin Nunez is going to an 89-rated card when some of the other ones start to get their upgrade. So he's not going to get upgraded right away, but he will get another plus one and go through an 89 when, probably, I would imagine that all of the teams who are going to qualify for the round of 16 are qualified and in on that Friday. They're going to upgrade these cards on Fridays after the games, after the first legs and the second legs are complete if I've read the fine print correctly. So it's going to be at least a couple of weeks till the upgrades, but these cards are rare. They are hype and people know they always rise so that you have to get it on them pretty early. And that's sort of the reason why you started to see these cards rise up yesterday. But those are the two places that I would focus on. I would focus on the cards that are guaranteed upgrades because they're already in the round of 16 and I would focus on players who have, quote-unquote, easier matchups and stuff like that. A couple cards that I have picked up. I picked up some Leon Bailey's because in the conference league, Villa, they're the same situation as Liverpool. They have already clinched the round of 16. Leon Bailey is a card that I bought yesterday for 100 and like, yeah, whoa, 188. Yo, let me get one of those because that's what I paid for him yesterday and he's already starting to rise. He's a pacy winger in the prem. He's had cards before that have been very overpowered. His playstyle plus isn't like the best for a wing player. I'll be completely honest, like ping pass. It's not bad, but like you would, I mean, imagine he had technical or something and on his card as well, the card looks pretty solid. He's got whipped pass. He's got rapid, quick-step, Trivella and technical regular. He's four star, four star, high low work rates. He can also play striker. So he's got a lot of things going for him positively with this card, which is another reason why I wanted to get him. But that's a card that's starting to go up again. I'll probably hold this, right? I'll probably hold this for a couple more days. That's what I want to talk about next. We kind of talk about who to buy. Focus on those good matchups and the players that could rise the most because people know there's the option to get upgraded, right? That's what you want to focus on. But when do you buy these cards? Obviously the prices are starting to go up and it kind of differentiates each year and each season. Right now we have Road to the Knockouts in the fall and Road to the Finals in the spring, kind of where we are now or late winter into the early spring. I want to look at how these cards fared earlier on this year and last year. This is last year's Road to the Final Team. I think there's going to be multiple buy windows and you're going to see as we look at a lot of these graphs if you buy at any point, either in the buy window that's maybe kind of going on right now or the buy window that's like, what, two, three, four days from now, you're going to make some profit because these are live cards and they're rare, guys. These cards are so rare on the market because like nobody's opening packs, it really is a W investment in my opinion. But let's look at this David Alba from last year. You can see David Alba was really low on the weekend, right? Kind of how it's been this weekend. Saturday, Sunday, Monday. He has a slow point. He's below a million coins and then boom, he goes up a bunch. Now, one thing that's different between this year and last year is this year's Road to the Final promo is happening a week before any of those knockout games. Last year, these cards were in packs while the games were going on. That's why he had that big spike up in price. So it's really not truly honest to go back and look at these graphs from last year. You can look at a couple of them because they were out a little bit earlier or maybe didn't play until the second week. But just kind of when you're looking back on last year's graphs, be careful with that. But like you can see, let's look at another card. Let's look at Badella. What did his card do last year, right? His card was low on the weekend and then boom, went straight up from 340k up to 400,000 coins and then dipped down a little bit. Yeah, there's going to be incredible opportunities. His card never went down below 400 or 380k. Basically below where he was that first weekend until he had a bit of a drop here in March. So his card when it came out was 330. Never went below that until March which was literally a month later. That's why these cards are so good to invest in because they almost always appreciate in value. Now let's go with something a little more recent. We had road to the knockouts earlier on this year with two different teams. How's the market? How did it react earlier on this year to these live cards? Sometimes I think looking at the current promos that are similar for this year actually give you a better representation of how the market might react again just because every year the market's different. This year there was a couple different buy windows for these cards. First of all, you had a window just like we're experiencing right now. Saturday, Sunday, Monday was the low. By the time we got to the midweek, Monday, Tuesday, DePaul went from 240 up to 260, 270 but then at the middle to the end part of the week he went down bad down to 194,000 coins before then exploding to 314k as the games were going on the upgrades were being clinched. Of course it is a game with these cards. I mean, I'm telling you guys to look at these cards and invest in them but we have to remember and it's really a good reminder these cards also could absolutely tank and that's why EA love putting out live card promos is because people make a lot of coins from these but overall people lose way more coins on these cards than make them. It's just all about knowing when to buy, when to sell and not really putting yourself in a lot of risky situations that you can avoid by selling in the hype which we will say a lot. So that's one thing I have to mention with these cards as well. Selling into the hype is 100% going to be the move but for right now a lot of them to me especially in the middle tier look viable for Rises in this week but I digress. Let's talk about these two buy windows again, right? DePaul went up and then went down and then went back up further. That was team one over to the knockouts. Team two with like the Modrich, the DeMaria, the Lewandowski I remember this Acuña card. Like I remember early on this year watching his price absolutely explode in the mid week. See look at this, two big time spikes here. He was low on Sunday. Everybody invested, invested up to 106 from 90K up to 106K. Nice rise and then boom straight back down at the end of the week to 86K and then boom all the way up to 112,000 coins. So I think something like this is very possible this week for these cards and I want to tell you why. I think there's going to be two buy windows. First of all, right now the game is pretty quiet and we've already started to see some of these cards go up. Lindsay Horan is another one which I will say this just a little bit of info for the women's UCL cards their schedule is kind of like pushed back like I think the draw for the knockout rounds of the women's Champions League is happening this week, maybe tomorrow on Tuesday or something like that. So just kind of like with the road of the knockouts their schedule a little behind that's how it also is for the actual knockout stages of the women's cards. So be careful investing in these. I think they're good investments. They have great links. Great. Like this double playstyle plus Horan looks insane. The bronze, the Google reten that was put out yesterday. They look nuts. But I think I'm staying away from these cards right now just because they don't get upgraded as soon and that might mean there's less people investing in them straight away. But what I would say is I think there's an opportunity just like you see here on this graph is to pick up some of these cards sell them midweek and then as we get towards future stars like future stars is always a really, really high promo guys. So I think that that could create some panic later on in the week with how things look and I think we might have a really good opportunity for this buy sell midweek and then you see a dip later on in the week is maybe there's marquee matchup supply. There's leaks. There's panic and stuff like that. So I think that's a really good opportunity that we have here. I'm glad that I got in on the Leon Bailey because he's starting to go up. If you got in on Don Aruma he's starting to go up as well. I think that's a really safe way to look at it or if you're like, nah, man, I don't want to touch these prices because some of you guys, I understand that as well. These prices, they're expensive. Like man, the fact that, you know, Lukaku with two play style pluses is a million coins or 955. Like if I saw 900K, I would buy it. I know I don't have the coins right now but that's 900K for him seems expensive but it's a price I would pay. You know, this Darwin at 1.3 mil is an interesting look as well but you know, these cards are going to be expensive. That's just how it's going to be because they're alive. They're upgrading people know there's hype there. But there's also kind of like we saw with the team of the years this last week, right? When there's panic and when people have a reason to sell cards because of whatever, like there can be some big drops as well. So that's what I would say. I think there's two buy windows this week. And again, if you want to try to pick a card, do a little research or figure out one that you want in your team and just be like, okay, I like this card. I'm going to go pick it up. I'm trying to stay away from the really expensive ones like Cruz, Gabi Jesus and Rafael Leal, even Ansu Fati. I'm staying away from those. But for the rest of the team, especially the ones that are like usable that's plugged straight into people's teams. I think there's real opportunity. That's why I really like Leon Bailey as well. I think there's real opportunity for an investment and for some profit. So they're rare, but they're a bit expensive. But that's how these cards always are. We talked about that just because the way we're coming out of team and you're in the market and stuff too. So that's a lot of talk about the marketing stuff. But I really wanted to spend time talking about that because this is one of those promos where everybody invests, but for decent reason the cards get upgraded and when that is there, there's a lot of hype and they're really rare. So I think there's good things coming and there's profits coming for those cards. Now, let's get into other content that is coming into this game today or at least very soon. We have yet again another Evolution League and we talked about it yesterday but it's the official stats. This one looks mid to me, man. I mean, the evolution that they dropped just a couple of days ago, Superpowers won. That one looked mid to me. This one looks mid to me as well. Like Max overall 88. Is that the highest Max overall that we have had this year in a evolution? I don't know. You can really upgrade some cards here pretty nicely like this Darmion if you had the Bruno Gamerash, if you have Kalulu. And I think that some of those cards are up a little bit on the market. Kalulu is 42,000 coins. Yeah, that would be, he is extinct. So he is definitely up in value from 20-something K that he was earlier because this leaked Evo. But guys, anytime they've dropped an Evo this year it's like a card type specific whether it's the Hero, whether it's the Icon or now Road of the Knockouts. It's just not good. I don't know what it is. I would like another nice Evo and I think we're being set up for that because the number of Evos out right now is kind of lower than what it usually is. But that evolution doesn't look too hype. I would say sell on the hype on almost all those cards except for their price ranges are really low. So I guess if you have a Kalulu, if you have a, I don't even know who else fits that Evo, it's up a lot in price. Maybe you just hold on to the card because it's any position and see if they update the price ranges. But I think this week's going to be a little bit of a slow week, guys. But that means it might be a good week to trade. That's why I bought a bunch of cards. I picked up an Essian. Don't sleep on these Team of the Year honorable mentions. These cards are going to be good to trade with. The Team of the Year cards still as well. Like this Kim and Jay, he was 260 yesterday and I just picked one up for two. I don't think I didn't get a 245. I think I paid 247 because I was like, that's a card that I see footbin movement on and that's a card I just want to trade with. So that's the one that I like. And I just like these cards. I mean, he links the Davies, he links the Kimmich and stuff like that. So that's why I try to pick up Kim and Jay. Is he below 250 still? Nah, he's right at 250. So the most I would pay is like 247. That way if you're selling hopefully at like 267 to 270, you're netting yourself around, that's almost like what, 10K per card. Not bad. So yeah, it's a decent flip on some of this stuff. Just watch the market and just again, remember what cards are the most hyped at the moment and these new ones are hyped. But let's talk about today because I'm hoping that today also brings some compensation for some player picks, right? Mondays are upgrade pack days but also it's the day where like EA gets back to work, right? You think about it, they had last week with Team of the Year. They're getting back to work maybe today. Hopefully today is the day where they give back compensation for the hero player pick, which we are due compensation for. Let me remind you, this is the real compensation situation that we've been waiting on because it was literally a week ago when they identified an issue with the 87 plus that was all 86 plus and they said players who received an 86 plus will be contacted in-game in the coming days and we are now in that window where the coming days is a week on from this which seems very possible to be compensated. So I would watch out for that today. Also Mondays, kind of we're getting back into this like normal promo mode, right? Mondays are usually upgrade pack days, 80 plus player pick, 80 plus double upgrade, something along those lines. I would imagine they drop an upgrade pack for Road to the Final. They know that people like upgrade packs, they try to drop those each and every promo now. I think we'll get something today. Some player picks to rinse through, unlimited repeatable, not going to complain about. I mean we had this 77 times three crafting that is technically still available. So maybe they'll drop us an 80 plus unlimited player pick. That would be cool. And then guys, I don't know what else is going to be coming today, but watch out for the EA tweet, the EA content tweet or Instagram post where they've been posting them recently. And the last thing I'll say is, watch out for leaks because the content's been slow or is slow and a lot of people are probably going to be looking for leaks. Who's this? Left wing Dutch PSG. Martins, 84 rated. Wow, 83 times five, and I get 84 rated. Cooked. Oh my gosh, that was absolutely terrible. Anyways, I think that with the slow week of content, the leakers that have that info, they're going to try to just hype it up a little bit. So there might be some leaks that slowly start to roll out in the next couple of days. I don't think that would impact the market on these road to the finals too much. I think it'll be later on in the week where you start to see some of those movements negatively happen those or impact those cards. But I think the road to the finals will do good on the market today. I think they'll do good into the week. And I think it'll be a great time to trade. It's just going to be a little bit slower than it was last week. That's for sure. But I'm glad that Footchamps is extended because I'm still excited to use some of the new cards that I was crafting from my team and got from SBCs and from Team of the Year, that whole thing. I'm very, very excited actually to try out Alex Morgan and some of these other cards. Now I haven't been able to play a ton of games with yet. So I'm glad that Footchamps is extended for that and so that I can procrastinate Footchamps and play it on not the weekend anyway. So I'm kind of excited for that but hopefully a little bit of a menu grind that's available with a player pick today. That would be very helpful. But guys, that's the video for me today. If you enjoyed it, drop a thumbs up on it, comment below if you have any questions and subscribe if you're new. It's been Nate from the Count. See you guys on the screen today. Peace out.