[QuantaCondor]

The Santa Barbara Golden Gophers -BFF just won their first PeL WS title. They are a BFF team, which means that they are a member of a friends list which includes a group of active Discord and forum users, also including developer Matt Arnold. The BFF League plays under the following restrictions:

1) 100% FTP teams; no PP bought whatsoever
2) No selling of packed gold+ historical cards. If you pull a huge historical card, you can't use that to fund a bunch of upgrades.
3) No using packed gold+ historical cards in collections. The only exception is if you choose to never sell the collection reward. So, if you pull a huge collections bottleneck, you can't use that to fund a bunch of upgrades by just doing the collection.
4) No soliciting of collections cards from Discord/other users, and especially no using your other accounts to influence your collections in any way. If you want to buy a collections bottleneck, you must wait around for it like everyone else.
Edit for clarity: 5) All members of BFF made a new team at the same time (8 seasons ago). So, every member of the league started out on the same level playing field.

These restrictions, together, were meant to fully remove the influence of pack pulls as accelerants on FTP teambuilding, and also to remove the influence of other accounts so there's no advantage to having had another account with a lot of PP on it. This is purely an exercise in how you can build a FTP team, from nothing, using only good decision making, into a Perfect League champion.

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The Golden Gophers were able to accomplish this by attacking virtually every available aspect of the game. I have 92 collections completed, including CWS, Athletics, Twins, Padres, Mariners, and Brewers. I've also completed the sets for SE Brecheen and SE Cash, as well as much of the rest of the DET collections. Also acquired a few cards (namely 99 Kershaw and 98 Dahlen) in pursuit of LAD collections, though I'm a long, long way from completing LAD still. Final notable collections probably include SE Sisler, Cursebreakers, SE Ichiro, Putting the Ball In Play, Nuclear Powered, Hornsby, Votto, Smoke Joe Wood, Yastrzemski, Lofton, Garber, Colavito, the LIVE sets for Athletics, Tigers, and Phillies, and virtually every standard pack collection.

I also have 80 tourney wins, which puts me T-7th in the PT Universe in tourney wins. I'll note that most of those came on 500 PP DoD tourneys, though there have been a lot of 32-man pack tourneys recently. No real notable returns from dailies, just a bunch of quick events. Also maybe worth noting that I was among the top 2 or 3 winners in tourney # during the tourney beta in which I did a lot of grinding of the 2k 16-man silvers.

Finally, I've made something like 250k or so by flipping important collections pieces. I think the *vast* majority of this comes purely from 3 CWS Appling diamonds, and a Kershaw. Though there is also a roughly 40-50k contribution from flipping 4 Haddixes. A lot of this was easier when the L7 values were broken, but I flipped a 90 Averill for roughly 15k a few days ago so there are still opportunities to be had even without abusing L7 bugs. I'd like to note that I explicitly did NOT want flipping to be the dominant strategy during this F2P campaign, so I only flipped cards that were already in my AH collections search strings. I suspect I could have made a lot more flipping if I was searching for all the bottleneck diamonds I know about every time I went to the AH, but I just don't think it's that fun and I didn't want to use that as a crutch.

I don't think I've been particularly lucky with achievements, especially not early on, as I've earned something like 4 gold achievements total (not counting the "Great Score" one) throughout my journey.

Finally, we come to the issue of packs. For the first 7 seasons (that is, Entry all the way through the Diamond playoffs), my best pull was 87 Carew. This is despite pulling 9 diamond packs over the course of those 7 seasons via collections, from which the best player was 93 POTM Bieber (who was never more than an SP4 and now holds a LR/low leverage role). I also probably pulled at least 80 standard packs from collections and tournaments, maybe closer to 100 or more during that time. All other pulls were valued at 7k or less (with two 97 Klubers being the only pulls in the 5k-7k range). In the 8th season of the team (or, more correctly, right at the tail end of the 7th season but too late to make any difference), I pulled a 99 Brown off a tourney pack (L7 is 300k, and my projections put him somewhere between the 10th and 15th best pitcher in the game). More on that later.

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Despite the pull luck prior to diamond, my collections strategy alone was good enough to make the team dominant. The first full season, and the only season I didn't get a promotion, was in the inaugural BFF Iron League. It's almost a lie to call this an Iron-level league, since basically every team in the league knew what they were doing and built a quality competitor immediately. I'd rank this closer to maybe Silver or Gold at least, in retrospect. I posted the 3rd best RDiff in the league, good enough for a 89-74 record, but got unlucky in the pythag department and lost a game 163 to miss out on the playoffs.

The following season, I came back to post the best RDiff in the league with something like a 2nd in ERA/2nd in runs statline, good enough for a 105-47 record. I managed to get promoted. And from there, it was downhill. The following seasons shaped up as:

Bronze: 121-41, 1st in runs/1st in ERA. WS win
Silver: 102-60, 2nd in runs/1st in ERA. Lost in CS. (lost runs title to another BFF team)
Gold: 114-48, 1st in runs/1st in ERA. WS win.
Diamond: 124-38, 1st in runs/1st in ERA. WS win.
Perfect: 104-58, 11th in runs/2nd in ERA (+212 RDiff). WS win.

Perfect WS win came in 7 games, but it came nonetheless. I'll note that 99 Kevin Brown was not a large factor in my success in his only full season with me thus far; he posted the worst ERA of any of my regular starters (3.30), and collected the most pitching losses of any of them as well (12-14 record). Not a bad player by any means, but it's not as if my success was being driven by this pack pull.

I run lefty park factors (+Lefty AVG and HR, -Righty AVG and HR, +GAP). I found this to be effective at lower levels where RHP is more common, though I am considering going to a pro-CON strategy (+AVG, +GAP, -HR both hands) at Perfect even after this result.

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I think that basically does it. Let it be known that there is not *any* level which is not accessible to a FTP player with a good enough strategy. I think we saw the first glimpse of that with ElementalKnight's post earlier in the year, but now I've witnessed in myself and in a number of seasons/weeks that I think would be pretty hard to repeat with 7 seasons being the minimum possible number of seasons to go from Entry to Perfect, and this having been done in 8.

I'd love to hear other exploits in FTP success that are floating out there, or answer any other remaining questions about the philosophy I used to accomplish what I did.