Before you buy FIFA 19 packs, you should ask to yourself if you should do it or not. This is probably the most common question about FUT 19 and we are here to clarify you. We answer to five big questions in order to teach you everything you need to know to take the right decision.
COMMON QUESTIONS
1 SHOULD I BUY FIFA 19 PACKS?
2 HOW PROFITABLE BUYING PACKS CAN BE?
3 AM I THE ONLY ONE WHO NEVER PACKED A GOOD CARD?
4 IS EA FORCING ME TO BUY PACKS?
5 HOW DIFFICULT IS TO PULL A GOOD CARD?
Should I buy FIFA 19 Packs?
The big question
When you make a purchase, you are giving something to get another thing in exchange. If you bought it, it is because in your opinion the thing you are giving is less important than the one you are purchasing. The problem in Ultimate Team is that you do not know what is inside the pack you are buying. There is no way to know if the exchange will be profitable. You have expectations in relation to the purchase but you do not know if they will be met.
It is possible to pay packs with coins or with FIFA Points. In the first scenario, your expectation is to pull cards whose market value exceeds the price of the packs. In other words, you want to make profit. This rarely happens. That’s why buying packs with coins is an awful idea.
When you buy FIFA 19 packs with FIFA Points, the chances of getting good cards are exactly the same, but instead of investing your coins, you are using real money. It’s like you were buying FIFA coins but you don’t know how much you will have to pay for them. In these cases, only you can say if it is worth to buy packs or not, depending on how much real money you are willing to spend.
How Profitable Buying Packs can Be?
Let’s talk about facts…
It isn’t easy to make a reliable study about this subject because it only works with a huge sample. Imagine, for example, that you open packs worth 3 million coins. If you open an extra pack and pull a Ronaldo card, your conclusions will be completely distorted. It is not possible for a single person to open enough packs to conclude if it is worth to buy packs or not. We did it but we combined our results with the community experience to conclude that, in a general way, you get back 55% to 65% of what you have paid by the packs. The other 40% are EA’s profit, ie, your loss. The same happens in the famous bookmaker’s sports scores where part of what you bet reverts automatically to the house, regardless of the result. Usually, they keep with something between 10 and 15%, but EA is not satisfied with less than 40%.
This first conclusion allows us to be sure about how bad a strategy it is to buy FIFA 19 packs with coins, except if you are someone really lucky. To know how much you will get back when you open packs bought with FIFA Points, you just need to look into our Packs Page. As you can see there, the return index is always very low. In average, you will get less than 20 coins for each FIFA Points spent.
Am I the Only One Who Never Packed a Good Card?
The others…
No. The most experienced Ultimate Team players agree with us about how bad of a strategy is to buy FIFA 19 packs. But there are still many less experienced players with other opinions. They are asking right now why are there so many people showing off the fantastic cards they pull from packs? Maybe because no one likes to show off rubbish and useless packs. If only good packs are shared, it gives the idea that all the packs have good cards. Nothing less true./p>
Many players also think that the only way to be a millionaire is buying FIFA 19 packs. They find other players on the market that are selling several very expensive cards and they think they got the money buying packs. They don’t. They probably are really good traders or have used scam techniques.
Obviously, there are many players that already know that buying packs is not a good strategy. However, that doesn’t mean that they give up from buying FIFA 19 packs. Why? First, because our brain is always trying to find the path of least resistance and finding ways to give as less effort as possible. Then, because of the need of being better, more popular and integrated into a group. This may seem a weird answer but the specialist Gonçalo Cunha explains this very well in this fantastic article. You must read it.
The odds of getting Messi in a pack are like 1 to 80,000 for each card player you open in a pack.Is EA Sports forcing me to buy FIFA 19 packs?
Sales strategies
Yes. Don’t forget that this is the FIFA core business for EA Sports. Think about it. To sell more packs, they try everything. EA uses a very aggressive marketing strategy, trying to give the impression that it is easy to pull good cards in packs, using their social networks to show players that got a good card or supporting the luckiest YouTubers that publish videos opening packs with the greatest players. On the other hand, they don’t add good cards to packs, forcing players to try their luck, again and again, hoping to get the same good cards that other players and YouTubers got. Promo Packs are strategically chosen and they even created an extra chemistry point – loyalty bonus – to force you to buy more packs.
Are you seeing how it works? Youtubers want to be famous and to be supported by EA Sports, so they produce videos showing how easy is to pull good cards from packs. Those who have the luck of getting good cards in FIFA 19 packs also want to share it with the world, to show their happiness or simply to make others jealous. They share it with EA Sports and the company share it with the world. All we see are good cards in packs, so why don’t we do the same. We buy one, two, three, four packs. ‘Maybe in the next one’, we think. Most of the times, players spend part of their coins or a good amount of money and they don’t get a single good card.
We are not saying to not buy packs any more. It is important that people keep buying packs. First, because they are paying the Ultimate Team mode (in the first year it was paid). Then, because the game only works if cards keep being inserted into the game and the only good way to do it is through the store. If players want to use real money to buy FIFA 19 packs, they should know that they will need to spend a good amount of money to get a good squad. We are not saying that it is not a good strategy, we are just saying that it is not a cheap option. For who don’t care with money, it is a decent decision.
There are other ways to get good players, but none of them is perfect. You can sell the FUT Champions, FUT Rivals and Squad Battles rewards or save the coins you earned in games, and use them to buy the cards you want in the market, but it will take a long time until you collect all the coins you need. Another good option is to make trading, which may be very profitable but it is also very time-consuming. Finally, you can also buy coins directly to a coins store but there is a high risk of being banned since this is not allowed by EA Sports.
How Difficult is to Pull a Good Card from a FIFA 19 pack?
Let’s talk about odds
For those who still don’t believe that buying packs is not a good strategy, we will show them with mathematics.
FIFA 19 Ultimate Team has more than 15,000 players. Which player do you want? Probably one of the most expensive ones, like Ronaldo. Let’s see what the odds are of getting him in a pack. First we must know how many players cards have the pack you are opening. Let’s say that you are opening a pack with 4 players. It means that your chances of getting Ronaldo are something like 1 to 3,750, right? Wrong! There are players with more cards in FIFA 19 packs than others.
Cardweight is a metric used to estimate how often a particular card is traded on the FIFA 19 Ultimate Team transfer market. The higher the cardweight number, the higher likely this card is traded on the marketplace. It gives an indication of how rare cards are. We estimate that the chance of pulling Cristiano Ronaldo NIF item is something around 1 to 150,000 for each card player you open in a pack. What do you think about this? Do these odds create a good opportunity? Let’s see. Pick a number between 1 and 150,000 and keep it to yourself. Now, ask someone to try to guess which number you are thinking of. How many times did that person try to guess it? Thousands, for sure. If you want to know how much money you will have to spend, just multiply the price of each player card in a pack by the number of tries. Now is that a lot of Money ?!
If you want to know your chances of packing other good cards, don’t forget to read our Pack Odds Guide (to be published soon).
Final note: if you want fun, choose opening packs. If you want success, avoid them, unless you don’t care about spending real money. In that case, EA Sports will thank you.