[vyshka]

After playing very casually in 19 and 20 (never got around to purchasing 21) I seem to be more involved with 22. Since I didn't want to dump money into the game beyond the initial purchase, I decided my strategy was going to be tournaments to generate packs. This is also my first edition where I've dipped my toes into the tournaments and I've gone a bit overboard, but it seems to be paying off in packs which in turn drive selling cards on the AH, or adding pieces to the teams. Most of my focus so far has been on the tournaments teams, so I need to start spending more time on the league teams.

Texarkana 1st: 27 2nd: 20 3/4th: 26 (377 tournaments | 418 packs | 1.11 packs/tourn)
Cedar Rapids 1st: 19 2nd: 19 3/4th: 29 (371 tournaments | 350 packs | 0.94 packs/tourn)


State of the Franchise: Texarkana

Packs to open:26
PP balance: 214k

Unlike Chandler (now in BFF) which benefited from an early pull of 100 Frankie Frisch which grabbed 200k on the AH and set them on their way, Texarkana did manage to sell a NL card early on that got them 30k plus some live 100s in the low 20k range. They did pull a Brooks Robinson who has been holding down 3B for the time being. Watching the AH the card(s) I have seen up there haven't been moving and his price has been dropped to the 125k range. Texarkana did finally finish the Live missions, stomaching the costs of finishing off LAD, CLE, and OAK figuring the value of the cards from the chained rewards of completing everything would be better than what I would get spending that money in the AH. Completing the live missions was another first for us this year. I haven't come up with a theme for them yet, so currently they are a mix of whatever lands into the roster from missions and packs.

Current Rotation: Young, Verlander, Sutton, Langston, Mendez

Current lineup:
C R. Campanella
1B N. Garciaparra
2B A. Kennedy
3B B. Robinson
SS A. Trammell
LF H. Wilson
CF C. Milan
RF E. Slaughter
DH T. Cobb

State of the Franchise: Cedar Rapids

Packs to open: 15
PP Balance: 172k

An early 100 Acuna pull generated 30k PP, which allowed them to get a jump on the live missions though they ended up being the last of my 3 teams to complete them. There have been some other live 100 pulls that continue to bring in the low 20k range. Probably the best pull was a gold NL which sold for around 50k when they first dropped. I will probably turn CR into a Reds theme team, and try to pull in cards like Larkin who actually play a ball for the team when it was the affiliate in the 80s.

Rotation: C Young, Varlander, Langston, Sutton, Pfeffer

Lineup:
C R. Campanella
1B N. Garciaparra
2B A. Kennedy
3B T. Pendleton
SS A. Trammell
LF J. Dehlanty
CF H. Wilson
RF E. Slaughter
DH Richie Hebner


So in both cases, they are largely fielding teams comprised of the Live mission rewards while I'm off chasing packs in the bronze tournaments. Both teams seem to be off to a decent start this season, while Chandler finally ran into a brick wall in gold for the first month.

I should add a decent amount of my time has been dealing with data collection on the bronze tournaments since I'm leaning on observed statistics, and trying to automate as much of that as I can to avoid human error and keep the boredom of pulling data in check. Initially working in excel I've moved to using a collection of scripts and the Pandas data analysis library in python.