 Hey guys, it's Nate, AKA the Foot Accountant. Welcome back to the channel. EA is removing a lot of things that we've known for a long time inside of Ultimate Team and it all is being found out through this pitch notes article that they dropped yesterday. What I wanna do is go through this and highlight all of the key points of information that you need to know to get yourself best ready and prepared for EA FC 24 that is coming so soon. If you're excited for the video today, drop a thumbs up on him and subscribe if you're new. This is one of the longest pitch notes articles they've ever written. Look at how many tabs are inside of here. So I'm gonna give you guys the short version because EA is waffling through the entirety of this thing. So we're gonna keep you updated and make it short. Now, first of all, W car designs they have up inside of here. This one right here, I'll tell you right after that is Foot Centurions. That looks like the Road to the Knockouts promo which is replacing a promo that we always have to start off the year in FIFA. It's changing this year. Now, let's start with what is coming up very, very soon. That is the early access and the Nike MadReady promo campaign. Of course, they are confirming the companion app launch but this is also just known because look, the web app is literally shut down, right? FIFA 23 web app is shut down. You can still go on the companion app but the web app is down for maintenance as it gets updated to FC 24. Of course, the 20th of September as the date we expected it to be is the launch of the web app and the companion app will update the next day. You'll be able to download it on your phone and get a new version of the companion app for FC 24. Of course, the 22nd is the date for the early access launch at midnight local time. That just confirms what we had known before. And then of course, if you're gonna be getting into Ultimate Team at the worldwide launch on September 29th with a standard edition, that is when that will launch, of course. Now, this is where it gets really interesting. The big change right off the bat that we're telling us about is ahead to the UEFA Road to the Knockouts promo starting on September 29th. Guys, once to watch is gone or at least it's not starting right away. And if it's not starting right away, then I don't know if they're gonna run a once to watch promo. Even though we had one of the craziest transfer windows of the entire like past decade or maybe ever, there's no once to watch this year. They're starting straight away with Road to the Knockouts on September 29th. That is what they're saying right here. Now, of course, before that, during the early access time period, we will have the Nike Mad Ready promo, which we know about now and we actually are a little disappointed about it, guys. This is what the Nike Mad Ready promo is about. There's going to be five players in packs. That's it, five players in packs. They don't even get any stat upgrades, guys. The same attributes as their base versions, they will only have a cosmetically upgraded card. So instead of gold kiesa, you can pack the Nike Mad Ready kiesa and the Enzo Fernandez version that'll have the same stats as their gold. But what we will then do with those cards is focus on using those to complete unique objectives to get special rewards. So basically it's you pack Enzo or buy Enzo, pack kiesa or any of the other five cards that are gonna be in packs, very small promo team, right? And you're gonna use those to go get rewards by objective. So I'm guessing maybe a pack, maybe a coin boost is probably not gonna be that insane. They say the objectives and rewards are gonna be tailor made to help you get in the best shape for the year ahead. So it's probably not gonna be that insane. They really talk this promo way up to what, we thought it was gonna be like upgrading the cards or something sick like that. But unfortunately it looks like it's just the level up promo, but you don't even level up the card. It's like you just get rewards based off the card that is in packs. So there's that, but it is kind of objective based. But again, the biggest thing is the Road to the Knockouts promo is coming on September 29th and not once to watch, which is really crazy. Now let's not waffle and get into the next information here because there's a lot. They went on a massive, massive rant here about seasons and how they are no longer going to be using swap tokens and swaps programs with the tokens. It's all gonna be like we've had at the end of FIFA 23 where everything's gonna be XP based in the seasons, which in my opinion, I like it. That way you don't have to keep track of swap tokens, it's easy with XP because you don't have to misplace it or worry about where it's gone. You still have to worry about how you get it and where you get it from, but I like it. It's easier, it's less messy and that's basically what they talked about in this part of the Pitch Notes article. Speaking of XP guys, we are now going to be able to get XP by just playing the game once again. We used to get XP to play the game, but then we didn't after they changed to this new season progress XP based model, but now that's coming back. Squad battles, rivals and champs will now feature weekly seasonal XP rewards. So like let's go and say you play a certain number of games and rivals or champs. I'm sure we're gonna figure this out. Maybe it's gonna look like it does in rivals where if you play a certain number of games, right? For milestones, you get certain rewards. Maybe it's gonna be like, hey, play three or four games a week or for every couple of games that you play, you get a couple thousand XP or 100 XP, whatever it's gonna be. It's just nice to be getting season progress now for playing the game like it used to be. So that's a W in my book, but this is where the biggest change really is happening right here. Foot champions guys, you may have heard about this, but EA goes right out and says it out of the gate. Sentence number two, the most notable change you'll see right away is at launch at the start of FC24, ultimate team, Redpix, will be replaced by rewards of equivalent value in game. I don't like those words because that means it's up to EA to decide what the equivalent value is. And a lot of times, let's be honest, they don't do a very good job of that. So I don't know what's changing guys. I don't know what it's gonna be. This can also be taken in a very positive light and say, wow, are EA actually going to put promo cards in foot champs rewards because that would mean equivalent value maybe in line with the power curve. If you read on a little bit more with what they talk about, what they're trying to do is make the foot champs rewards progress throughout the year a bit more with the power curve because they say that people didn't use their Redpix a lot in game, especially during the second half of the year and stuff like that, which makes sense. Like how many Redpix, until you get the team this season and they upgrade the rewards for tots, how many of you guys were using a lot of Redpix in your team? Well, of course, how many of us actually get usable Redpix rewards anyway? So it seems like they're making a change for that because they want us to use more of those rewards players. Now I wouldn't be surprised if we're gonna be very disappointed at the very beginning with Redpix not being there and maybe whatever is in rewards is gonna seem really bad. I don't know what it's gonna be, but they do say they're going to be upgrading rewards a lot more frequently throughout the entire year. So that gives me hope and promise that there's gonna be some better rewards this year and at least it'll be kind of on a chart and a graph upward with the power curve. That's how rewards will be as well. But it doesn't say that there's no Redpix for the whole year, by the way. It does say that they could be coming back. They're just not in game at the start of the game. Just wanted to point that out. Also, speaking of champs and rivals rewards, well, for champs specifically, rank two and above, they're gonna be updating them. I think what EA is mentioning here is they are gonna update rewards so that they try to make the most elite top tier players on the game actually go for those rank two, rank one rewards instead of stopping at 11 wins. Now honestly, I think they should have moved this down and increased rank three, two and one rewards because there's a lot of difference in a big skill gap between 11 wins and 18 wins. Even 16 wins, there's a lot of difference there. So I think they should have maybe increased rank three rewards as well. But we'll see. They're also making division rivals rewards for two, one and elite division better so that they could, of course, better pay out those higher and more elite players, which is a W, no problem with that whatsoever. And then of course, big changes to your squad battles is four minutes and a half instead of six and they're reducing the number of matches you have to play from 40 a week to 32 to get your maximum number of points. I love this last line. Our aim is with these changes is to increase the amount of time you spend actively playing in the game versus playing out the clock in some matches. Yeah, that's all I do in squad battles is literally get objectives done, but that's because that's where you tell us to play objective. Yeah, I'm still gonna play squad battles this year and do objectives, but that's what EA is trying to do, especially in the early game, let's be honest, we play squad battles in the early game to get used to the game and get rewards. But regardless, I thought that was kind of funny. Now moving on with evolutions, we've talked a lot about evolutions. These are the three car designs. I don't wanna talk a ton about this, but there are some really interesting aspects of evolutions we're gonna find out about right away. EA has told us that there are going to be 12 different evolutions that'll be available across the first season. And again, season that means like season progress with XP, the nine, 10 week period is what it looks like it's gonna be. There are 12 evolutions and they told us two of them. And I think a little bit of confusion is coming up here because this makes it seem like you're only gonna be able to upgrade 12 players and that's it. Well, realistically with evolutions, like you can see here, there's like requirements. So it's not just Mukoko that you can use in this evolution and you can see here, this is from EA's website, there's different evolutions that you can put different cards into. There's basically gonna be 12 different evolutions. You can start with a player, but a lot of different players can fit into each of those evolutions, if that makes sense. Really what I think this is gonna have to do is and we're really just gonna have to get into the game to see how this works because these are very in depth. There's a lot of small details to how these evolutions work that we're gonna have to figure out and I think we're just gonna have to figure those out by playing the game. But they did confirm that gameplay, utility, and cosmetic. So stats, overall upgrades, and then individual upgrades like stamina, evolutions can also upgrade by adding alternate positions, adjusting work rates, and then of course, card designs. I'll also imagine that utility would include play styles and play style pluses. So you're gonna be able to really change the total dynamic of a card throughout the year. And they also mentioned in here with evolutions that we are gonna be able to have specific promos that will have card designs that change. Because not only are you gonna put bronze, silver, gold cards into an evolution to upgrade it, you can put promo cards in as well if that fits the requirements. And for centurions, which they said is going to be one of the early campaigns in FC24, interesting. It's gonna be an evolution's kind of like based promo or centurions is gonna operate as a normal promo, but it'll have a tie in with evolutions where when you put a centurions card that you pack or buy off of the market into an evolution, it's actually gonna update its card design once you're in progress with evolution and complete it. I think that's sick. Come on now. The graphic design team, killing it again as always. W from EA, because that just takes, it doesn't make your centurions card all of a sudden evolutions. It makes them like a centurions evolution, which is really sick. A lot of customized ability there. Love that from EA and evolutions. We just gotta learn more guys because there's, they seem very confusing. There's a lot of details with all of those. Now, speaking of details, team of the week details look like they're about the same. The biggest news with team of the week is though, every single team of the week player from launch will be 80 overall and above. Guys, no more bronze and silver team of the weeks. Every single team week's gonna be 80 and above, which is also really interesting. You think about EA giving out a bronze or a silver card in team of the week. They're gonna get boosted all the way to 80 rated, which is kind of sick. And it might actually bring some really cool players to life inside of the meta with stats that are boosted, otherwise that would not be that usable. It does kind of mean maybe the removal of silver stars, not entirely sure. But in my opinion, that's pretty cool. And then also they mentioned that team of the week players can get the bigger boost like they did last year, depending on the power curve. And also featured team of the week cards are back guys and they can still upgrade week foot and skill move upgrades. And if a featured team of the week gets a skill move or a week foot upgrade, that will now carry over to the next team of the week item for that player. Freakin' W, EA, thank you for doing that. That was needed. Now, last couple of things here, icons, right? We know icons only have one version. This was nice of them to show us like some of the upgrades they did for the base versions of icons that are dropping this year. Ben Nistelroy got a plus one week foot. Henri got plus 10 balance. Hulet is actually Hulet Gang. But again, it's his prime picture. So it makes us think about the best version of Hulet and Dino is 93 rated with the prime Dino picture. So that's just gonna take a little bit to get used to. And they're talking in here about how there's gonna be more icons and heroes in promos this year and in different pack promos. They said not every campaign or promo will have icons or heroes impacts, but a lot of them more this year will include those so that they can update them throughout the game. And this is the really interesting part here. With icons, similar to the senior and junior trophy Titans, AKA big bro and little bro trophy Titans, you can expect to see campaign versions of icons rated above and below their base version. So imagine like a flashback icon. I don't know if that's possible, but like imagine a little bro Hulet who instead of getting the 90 Hulet, who on the market is gonna be millions of coins, you can get little bro Hulet and he's like 86 rated like his base card used to be or something. And he's like, you know, 300 K instead of Hulet being as expensive as he is. So that could be cool, but also seems a bit interesting, right? So we'll see how that ends up playing out heroes. Once again, the coolest thing about these Champions League heroes is if you're pre-ordered and you're getting the free hero in the pack, we get it two weeks before they're actually gonna come out in the game. So that'll be cool for those two weeks. If you got the pre-order pack, you'll have one of these cards two weeks before anybody else will, which is pretty dope. Again, these are not gonna be impacts from the start of the year. The heroes we are getting in packs are the base versions. There's more of an orange card design with a little bit lower stats than these. So that's that. Women's football, women's football and ultimate team. Big note that I wanna press here guys and talk about for a second is a lot of people are worried that with the hype of the women's cards and a lot of women's players being added into this game that they're gonna be in like every single promo 50-50 split with men. And EA right here has just kind of given us something to expect, right? They said, at a similar scale to non-top five men's leagues. We know the top five, right? Non-top five leagues would be like Air DeVizze, MLS, the Saudi League before this year. It's probably gonna be a lot of Saudi League in FC 24. They said that at a similar scale to that, which think about how many Air DeVizze or MLS cards we have in each promo, right? We don't have that many. Maybe one, maybe an objective player in one or two players in packs per week. Not that many, right? They said that women's players will be made available as a part of campaign squads at a similar scale. So it's definitely not like we're gonna have, you know, a promo card that is a women's footballer in like every single promo or like many of them in every single promo. Since there's not a ton of them in the game, I think that's the reason why EA is doing that. There's only five leagues guys. So I would not worry about that if you're worried about that. And also I think that actually answers some of the questions as to why some of these women's footballers have absolutely cracked stats. Like Puteas' card, five star, five star is nuts. A lot of them have a four star or a five star weak foot insane stats and play styles on their cards. And really if you think about it, that makes sense because if EA is releasing less promo cards throughout the year and they're still focusing on putting the players in packs that for them are gonna make them more money by selling more packs, right? Top five leagues, players from Real Madrid, players from PSG, players from Manchester United, and stuff like that, the players that people want to try to pack and get the best versions of and spend money for, they're gonna put those guys in packs, but maybe they had to juice the women's cards just a little bit because they're not gonna get as many specials this year and there's just not gonna be as many of them released because there's just five leagues of women's football. So that's very interesting to note and it's definitely gonna, we'll see how that plays out during the entire year. Now, speaking of those like lower leagues, if you will, Air Divisie, Liga F, which is the women's La Liga, NWSL and MLS are gonna have squad foundations. You guys remember squad foundations, right? They come out in the earlier parts of the year, their objective base for objectives to complete, to build squads around those different leagues where they usually give you three or four cards from a certain league. They said that those are gonna be coming out during season one. So we're gonna be getting four different squad foundations. So technically, this is like investment opportunity here for whichever one's gonna come out first. Players that link to those cards, if there's good cards released in squad foundations or cards you need to complete the objectives, probably players from each of these leagues are gonna be something to watch here in the first season, first couple of months on Ultimate Team because those might be moving up and down in value. Now talking about some other promo cards, they've shown us some card designs here, guys. The end of an air design, I think this one looks sick. I don't know what you guys think. This is the design obviously from FIFA 23. It's the same kind of like purple color, but I think that's pretty dope. The flashback design looks dope as always. Showdown looks pretty cool. I don't know if that's the upgraded version and then Team of the Week, we know what that looks like as well. But the other card designs down here look very simple. It's like a very big contrast between like a lot of graphic work, a lot of crazy things going on and then just like AI cannot blend but just like simple card designs. So maybe they're trying to like appeal to a lot of different people's I guess design, what they like in design and simple stuff which is like crazy stuff, but I love these. These card designs on the top row here are actually sick. So Gigi's the EA. Again, showdowns, they said there's gonna be plus two overalls for those. Team of the Weeks are gonna include the normal players that they always have plus performances from top five women's leagues, dynamic duos are gonna drop. So it sounds like a lot of the content that we're used to getting is gonna be continually dropped on this game just with the new card designs and of course with the new card shape and stuff like that as well. Now this is a big one. This is a real big piece of information guys. A lot of people thought that the market was gonna be one big shared market this year with PC and console and EA is putting this all underneath the Nintendo Switch option and tab here cause they're actually updating the Nintendo Switch. If you know anybody who plays Ultimate Team on Nintendo Switch, it's actually like more legit and updated because it hadn't been updated since like FIFA 20 or something like that, something crazy. But anyways, the market is not all one big market. It's just like it was in FIFA 23 guys. There's going to be the shared console market with PlayStation and Xbox and also the PC market still being separate. So even though there was some leaks about that happening, that is not the case. Footshare have tweeted about the market being actually, you know, combined and that is not the case whatsoever. That also worries me about this tweet that he had because yeah, guys, we know sometimes leaks are wrong and they're incorrect. But one thing that Footshare said that really would change a lot about the market this year is he mentioned that if a player has a team of the week, their gold card would be packable at the same time as the team of the week. Don't know if that's true or not still. But I'm a little worried that this maybe is not true and kind of like we were planning on it to be true. We'll just have to see. They didn't mention anything about that in terms of the market inside of these pitch notes which makes me think that maybe the market's gonna stay the same as it was and that if a card is in packs for a promo version, maybe their gold is gonna be out of packs like in previous years. Not a lot of news on that yet. We'll find that out here very, very soon. This eSports tab is literally just when we collect eSports live watching rewards we'll do it through objectives, W and then founder status. I wanna touch on this really quickly because this actually, I don't know what to think about this guys. Founder status, it's cool. It seems cool. It is basically if you log into EAFC 24 Ultimate Team before November 1st, you're gonna be a FC founder. Like a foot founder is back in the day when the old FIFA Ultimate Teams or first started, you'll be an FC founder if you start this year with badges and evolution, kit, stadium vanity and XP. Those are all the rewards for FC founders and we'll get those when you log into the game before November 1st. Now my worry is if we go back here to the very beginning and I show you guys one of the first things we looked at here, we talked about the early access period. EA mentioned in here, if I can click on early access, there we go, that players logging in on PC and console before November 1st, we'll see your new FC founder status rewards replacing returning user rewards. Does that mean that we're not getting welcome backpacks this year? Question mark. I do not know and that concerns me just a little bit. I still think there's a very high potential of us actually getting welcome backpacks because again, with the preseason rewards, stuff is transferring from FIFA 23 Ultimate Team to EA FC 24. But if we're gonna all be starting off our web apps this Wednesday and not having welcome backpacks, that's gonna make the web app very difficult because that means we have no way to generate coins at all. It's gonna be very difficult, I should say, to generate coins because there's gonna be only a couple objectives that you can do to get coins. You're gonna have nothing in your club. I mean, it's gonna be difficult to really start your often team on the web app if that's not the case. So that might be me reading into it just a little bit, but it seems like like they said there in the early access tab, it replaces the returning user rewards. And again, those are just very vague anyway. Like what even are those? Is that welcome backpacks? Is it something different? We don't really know. So that's my biggest question going forward from this. Let me know what you guys think down in the comments and let me know what you guys think about the champs changes or the changes with the content and the car designs and the seasons. It's really like this pitch notes was a thing of like a lot of little changes that they just waffled about for ages, right? There's no brand new modes. I know a lot of people were thinking, oh Nate, are we gonna have something else besides squad battles, division rivals and footchamps and friendlies to like play? I know we have draft as well, but I think some people were hoping for like a new mode or something big to be added into EAFC 24. And this doesn't really add something big into the equation. All it really does is it fine tunes a lot of things. And it's a lot of like medium to small changes of already existing content in the game or modes inside of Ultimate Team. So I know Evolutions is big. That's a pretty big addition. So I won't write that off, but let me know down in the comments what you think about this. There's just a ton of information and I'm gonna bring it to you guys today in a shorter format because EA was waffling. If you go read this entire thing yourself, it's gonna take you like an hour to try to understand it and think about it at the same time. So that's the video for today guys. If you did enjoy, smash a thumbs up on it. Comment down below if you have any questions and subscribe if you're new. Get ready to get into the stats guys. We're gonna have some videos coming up very soon about player ratings because it's getting real. Ultimate Team's almost here. All right guys, catch you in a video tomorrow. It's been Nate Thode Counting. Peace out.