Tag: FIFA 22

Icons like “R9” Ronaldo and Ruud Gullit have captured and held the imaginations of FIFA players ever since their introduction a few years ago, and this remains true in FIFA 22 Ultimate Team. But the very best Icons—ones that genuinely hold their own against the top promo cards—also cost a small fortune, so for most FUT players the best chance to unlock one is through an Icon pack. Whether it’s an Icon pack obtained through a Squad-Building Challenge or from Icon Swaps, opening one of these fabled receptacles is a moment to savor. So, naturally, the FIFA community has dreamt up a way to drag it out as much as possible.

You see, just ripping an Icon pack is a bit dull. The excitement lasts less than five seconds as the boards light up, the nation and position are revealed, and out walks somebody who costs less than the price of the SBC to ruin your evening. But with an Icon Roulette—the format that has gone viral in recent years across YouTube and Twitch—it is possible to drag out the tension and excitement for quite some time. Every pack becomes Schrödinger’s Ronaldinho. The little wizard probably isn’t in there, but until you definitively confirm he isn’t, perhaps he is!

Essentially we’re going to save the Icon into the club without seeing who it is, then search through nation by nation until his identity is revealed. But getting the most out of Icon Roulette requires a specific approach to maximize the anticipation. Having an audience is good, too, even if it’s just your child, pet, or significant other. So if you want your next Icon pack to be more than just a flash in the pan, follow our guide to extract the most entertainment!

Since its launch a few years ago, Team of the Year has become the most anticipated and arguably most exciting ‘promo’ on the Ultimate Team calendar, and FIFA 22‘s is shaping up to be no exception. It has a simple premise: EA Sports puts out a squad of the 11 best footballers of the previous calendar year, based on a mixture of voting and the developer’s own editorial discretion. But unlike the average promo team, there are no duds, and every card is considerably more powerful and well-rounded than your everyday special player.

So what, you may ask? The average fan will never pack one without spending a fortune on FIFA Points. That may be true, but TOTY is such a festival of hype and surrounding in-game content that there are usually lots of ways to get involved, whether by opening saved packs and grinding the ever-popular “upgrade SBCs” (Squad-Building Challenges), or by taking advantage of market fluctuations to build up your FUT coins. Whatever your approach, you will want to prep your club before the festivities begin, which is usually in mid-to-late January.

EA Sports releases new ‘special’ cards into FIFA 22 Ultimate Team every week. The developers put premium players into packs, and also offer some to grind towards through Squad-Building Challenges and Objectives. This steady influx of desirable new players means that even very good cards fall by the wayside rather quickly. Many will bottom out and reach ‘discard’ price, meaning that discarding them through the menus will compensate you with just as many FUT coins as you would receive for listing them on the Transfer Market.

But that doesn’t mean these cards are bad. In fact, it’s perfectly possible to assemble a great team using nothing but players who fall into that ‘discard’ price range, and still be competitive in the higher echelons of FIFA 22 Ultimate Team. Here is a team we put together for less than 170,000 coins, which a committed player could earn just by playing game modes like Rivals and Squad Battles for a week or two and opening the rewards. All these cards are available on the Transfer Market for their discard price or a few thousand more, and the team gets 100 chemistry in-game, with everyone on full chem except Adel Taarabt on 8.

Follow us to the end of the journey and we’ll tell you how it fared in the FUT Champions Weekend League!

As much as we all want to play the beautiful game, FIFA 22 is a results business—you can toss out Rabonas and Elasticos until the cows come home, but if you can’t put the ball in the net at the end of the day then it’s all for naught. Fortunately, FIFA 22 is also a video game, which means that certain patterns of play are more powerful and effective than others. Here are five of the most reliable ways to score goals in FIFA 22, based on hundreds of hours of practice!

Game communities often develop their own jargon, from rocket jumps to 360 no-scopes, and FIFA is no exception. Squads in FIFA 22 Ultimate Team are ‘sweaty’ (reliant on pace more than skill), players are ‘discard’ (they sell for the same amount you get discarding them) and, more recently, every affordable player who outplays his stats and becomes broadly popular is a ‘rat’.

Rattiness has become more than just a label for the players, too. A popular corner-pass-header exploit is now “the rat corner”. Spamming through balls to a fast striker is “ratty behavior”. In fact, “ratty” has pretty much replaced “toxic” as the pejorative adjective of choice for FIFA players. Darwin would love to see it.

But what is the ultimate expression of rattiness possible in FIFA 22 Ultimate Team? What is the squad that most efficiently rides that perfect storm of affordability, in-game quality, and widespread popularity? In the interests of science, we offer you this composition.