Meet the 5-time PL Champion, Free-to-Play Gold Saucer Wonder Squares + AMA
 

Meet the 5-time PL champion Wonder Squares. 100% free-to-play. The Wonder Squares were one of my favorite teams I created in a fictional league that was a combination of Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft, and I decided to name my primary PT team after them.

https://i.imgur.com/Nt6hDuy.png

Here's the current roster:

https://i.imgur.com/OFtnbSN.png
https://i.imgur.com/lYMNmSc.png

I'm proud of what I've accomplished in game over the last six months, so let's talk. Ask me anything. I think some of what I've learned might be interesting or helpful to others.

Edit: Transaction history added: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ERcYlxWx8U

Looks like about 5 million PP at current prices.

Crazy team to put together with zero dollars. I sense some utterly insane pack luck.

I'd love to hear what your secret was to getting this group together. Might help me with my F2P teams. :D

That's gotta be close. I'd guess that I paid somewhere between 5 and 6 million in total for this team.

Minimal pack luck. The only packs I've opened are Challenge Mode packs and collection reward packs. I got Tim Keefe two weeks ago out of a Challenge Mode pack, and the best thing I got from collection diamond packs was John Clarkson. I've gotten little else from my packs.

As for the secret, there's a lot to say, and I get the feeling it'll all come out over the course of the topic. The short answer is that I've been very active flipping cards on the auction house. I think about half of the "Auction House Laughs" thread is about me, which has been entertaining to watch.

This might not be a popular take, but PT is a market game first and a baseball game second. I used to run market activities for my guild in WoW, and I had a very successful market niche in EVE Online. I'm experienced at this.

It's the same as the FIFA market too, and just being an active flipper, and the occasional investor for collections. Nice team!

Thanks! I should also mention that I had a successful strategy from the start to capitalize on collections and tournaments. Most of my PP was made once collections launched. Even though tournaments haven't happened yet, basically all the cards I had accumulated for them proved useful for collections.

well, one of your keys must be missions, as you have completed 77 of them. However, you cannot sell the players you buy for missions as they get locked. I also have a sneaking suspicion that you spend a LOT of time on the game doing all this activity.

I would like to see transaction history screenshots showing several million points gained. There's no way to get most of those cards via missions.

Sims happen once every 30 minutes, but the auction house is always going.

I'm an ADHD academic. When I'm working, I basically always have the game on in the background and have my main searches primed. I'll tab in, search, and if all is the same, I'll go back to my work. Takes two seconds. In terms of focused play, I'd say I put in about an hour a day on average. Certainly more than most I'd think, but not ludicrous.

My transaction history is 716 pages. I wish I could easily export it to Excel or something.

Completing missions is not a source of PP for me—it's definitely a sink. But flipping mission pieces has been my most successful approach to gaining PP.

Would you watch a You Tube video where he starts at Page 1 and flips through at 2 seconds per page? Should be about 39 minutes to watch without stopping. :laugh:

The first million must be the hardest, I'm assuming with no outlier pack pull. How, for example, did your fist weeks go? Although it might be nice to view your transaction log, perhaps a screenshot of your history of wins and losses might be interesting for a starter.

This is unquestionably true. My first flip was buying High Pockets Kelly for 400 and selling him for 1000. I targeted historical silvers from the start, thinking they'd provide the best return on investment (especially with gold packs being abundant at the start). I was right. Once I got a sufficient pool of capital to work with from flipping historical silvers, I branched out and invested more. It was also extremely fortuitous that historical silvers were vital to collections. I should also add that I played the market way more actively at the start.

Here's the win-loss record. Guess when collections hit:

https://i.imgur.com/7emVY2E.png

I mean, I could show off the transaction log in video form kind of like you describe, but it'd be boring to make and even more boring to watch and verify. I don't blame anyone for being skeptical of what I'm claiming here.

So, it looks like the major pieces were assembled after 20 weeks, or about 250K per week. Even 100K per week is a lot of silvers to flip, and would take more than 2 sec. I mean I have 1 search that I copy and paste into the AH then search and then buy or not takes 10 seconds. Posting 1 silver to flip takes about as long and that's with no mistakes. So, yeah, no money and minimal time is what you have claimed to make that team.

No money is true. Minimal time takes more explanation. I definitely played more actively early on. For flipping silvers, I took about two hours every two days listing them all. I put them up for 48 hours. If something sold, I took 30 seconds or so to replace it if I had it in stock. The tabbing in is harder to quantify—it's definitely a frequent habit for me given the ADHD. But it doesn't interfere with my work, which is nice.

The other thing though is that having capital makes things easier. Once I could flip diamonds for collections reliably, I didn't need to take the time to flip silvers. And I certainly hit a few jackpots. I had two 91 Aarons that I snagged at 20k and flipped for 200k.

A show-off video wouldn't bore me

Honestly, if people are interested, I'm willing to do this. Some strategic things become pretty clear once you look at the nitty-gritty. It's hard to pull out a page or two that's representative, though.

I realized I probably need to wait until tonight to make it, because sims send you to the homepage, and that resets where you are in the transaction history—unless there's a way to jump to a specific page that I don't know about.

No money can be easily verified if you give permission for one of the developers to chime in with a "true" or "false" on your claim.

Was investing in live diamonds with a view to making perfect not a part of your strategy?

I can believe no money, but if you can study the AH and accurately judge the market and never make a mistake, you should be playing the game called Day Trading Stock Market or Futures Market.

I definitely give a developer permission to chime in on the no money claim.

I'm experienced with markets, and PT 19 was a good learning experience for me. I wasn't as successful there, though I still did create a team that got to Perfect and was never relegated. I make mistakes, but they tend to be small and correctable.

Example: I bought Kluber for 50k thinking he was Averill. I sold him for 43,199 after tax. But I don't make mistakes like that often.

As for reading the market, I disagree. I think there are lots of things that have been systematically underpriced relative to what people will pay for them. Sellers seem to feel bound by the last 7 price. Buyers are not, especially whales. That was one of the big lessons I took away from PT 19.

As for live diamonds, it wasn't a part of my strategy at all. I assumed people who followed MLB more actively would be far better at speculating than I would be. There's plenty of money to be made there, but that was work I didn't want to do.

I should say this explicity: the ADHD and frequent tabbing make me a particularly good sniper of bad auctions. That is low-risk and lucrative. As to whether that's time consuming, again, that's open to discussion. While sitting here, I picked up Piersall for 4,200. He had been up for 5 minutes.

One more addition: When the devs posted data about how to use the AH search effectively, I took it to heart. I try to craft efficient searches. I don't want to post my searches here, given the fact that it would basically dissipate my income source, but I think searching efficiently is an undervalued skill.

Well, I guess that destroys the need to "balance" the game. Obviously, free-to-play players CAN compete with the whales. No need to have separate leagues, super leagues, or any of that. The ftp people just need to be smarter and work a little. ;)