I made a post about this in someone else's thread but incase you haven't seen it I figured I would make a seperate post about this.
Just for those free to play and wondering if you can have success in this game. I have 3 teams and 2 of them have been in Diamond for a couple weeks now and my third team has finally been promoted from Gold to Diamond finally this week so the long journey to Diamond has finally come to and end. What I would suggest free to play players do is make the best iron and Bronze teams you can do and then just spam those teams in the 2 and 4 pk reward tournaments as much as you can. You will lose the majority of the time but on average I get anywhere from 4- 8 packs total a day over my 3 accounts.. Also do the historical simulation every 72 hours for each team so you can get a pack reward from that. Most people just use the 1927 yankees since that is the most overpowered team for it.
Another thing I suggest to do is to the MLB Live collection missions. This is the key to the whole thing. You get such great players from this as reward that you can just use a team full of these reward players and you will be able to get to Diamond. You probably won't ever win a diamond championship with that team but at least you can get to Diamond and it's a great starting foundation team with which to add some players to. I still use the SE Ichiro, SE Billy Williams, SE Piazza, SE Yaz, SE Bagwell, SE Berra, SE Cano, SE Maddux and also the SE Blyleven. I did this for two of my teams right off the bat but my third team I wanted to see if I could have success without doing the mlb live collection missions but the team was lagging too far behind and I couldn't get any pack luck from it so I finally finished this collection for my third team last week and that was enough to propel it to the top of gold and now into Diamond.
Just have to change your expectations. Winning a perfect league or even getting to one is probably never going to happen so as long you can come to that realization then you should be good to go. Diamond is attainable though.
One last tip when doing the mlb live team collections. What I did for each collection was check the reward on the auction house and see what the price it's going for. Minus the 10% tax from that and that is the amount that you are shooting for when trying to finish the collection. The cheaper you can get it done the more profit of course. I overpaid for so many cards because I would get to the point where I was sick of waiting for certain cards but if you are patient you can get some good deals and make some really good pp from doing these sets and selling the rewards.
Also you get lot's of packs from completing the divisions and leagues so a good chance to hopefully get some good pulls from those as well.
You also don't need a ton of pp to get the live collections done. What I did was finished off the team and then I sold the reward from the team and then once that sold I used the money to do the next team and on and on and on. You will find that the PP adds up especially as you get further into the set and get the division and league rewards. I sold off many of those rewards and then once I was done the whole collection I bought back some of the SE rewards that I had sold before since once you finish the collection you should have a pretty nice amount of pp.
Another thing I want to mention is that once you get to Diamond there are a couple paths you can take with your PP. There are some people that just like to save up the pp from achievements and then save up the pp from the cards they sell from the tournament pack rewards and then use that pp to buy players. That is one thing you can do. What I chose to do was to use all of the PP that I got from achievements and tournament reward packs to buy packs and hope for a homerun pull. I did have a few perfect pulls last week in two of my accounts so that helped make the team better. I would then sell the player that it replaced and then use that pp to buy more packs. Rinse and repeat. It is way harder to earn pp in diamond from achievements though so it's a much longer grind to get the players you would want. Also my mindset for opening packs was that my team was at a severe disadvantage because I have not spent money so what would help my team more. Grinding for a couple weeks and using that money for a marginal upgrade for my team or just throwing the pp I get at packs for a couple weeks and hope I hit a homerun and get a great player I can add to my team or that I can sell and then buy a hand full of players with that pp.
For me the journey has pretty much come to an end. My goal was to get all 3 of my teams into Diamond without spending money and once I did that I felt that I had accomplished what I wanted to do and I was fine with that. I made the playoffs in Diamond with one of my teams but I never thought I would have a chance of winning a title at that level because the teams I would go against in the playoffs have a better player at every position then I do so it makes it pretty difficult to pull off the upset.
This was to show you though that if you don't spend money you still have a chance to get to the highest levels. Good luck with your journey
