How do you balance giving a Cristiano Ronaldo card out in FIFA 22‘s Ultimate Team that absolutely everyone will want? According to EA, you make players complete not 4, not 10, not even 15 SBCs, but 26.
Twenty-six. I genuinely thought it was a meme when I first saw the news, but no: It’s hilariously real.
If 26 sounds like a lot of Squad Building Challenges to complete, that’s because it is — significantly more than any other card. This is Cristiano Ronaldo, and a special card to celebrate him being named the Premier League’s Player of the Month for September 2021 at that, but 26 squad-building challenges is so over the top that it’s like EA is just desperately trying to curb players getting the card so that most squads don’t get completely broken.
https://twitter.com/EASPORTSFIFA/status/1446415079017271320
Here’s all of the SBCs you have to complete to get Ronaldo’s POTM card in FIFA 22:
– Tactical Emulation
– Premier League
– Portugal
– Top Form
– 85-Rated Squad (x3)
– 86-Rated Squad (x5)
– 87-Rated Squad (x4)
– 88-Rated Squad (x4)
– 89-Rated Squad (x4)
You have to complete every single one of these puzzles to unlock Cristiano Ronaldo’s September 2021 Premier League POTM card. While you will get rewards for completing each individual SBC, including a Gold Players Pack, Jumbo Gold Pack, and Premium Electrum Players Pack, it seems like a card whose cost, both in terms of time and coins, far outweighs the end result.
The 92 rated card is just one point above Ronaldo’s normal card, itself worth an absolute fortune on the transfer market, but is it really worth all this extra work? It’s not just a bit of extra hassle to complete 26 SBCs, it’s a part-time job that you only have 13 days to get through.
To explain why 26 SBCs is such a ludicrous amount for those who may not know: SBCs require to use your cards to build specifics squads based with certain parameters. They’re basically like puzzles but for FIFA and are quite a popular way for players to get rid of their untradeable cards. Players often use the transfer market to buy cheap SBC players as fodder, and it can usually be a fun distraction at the very least.
Trouble is, most SBCs require a lot of research and FIFA Coins for you to complete. And these SBCs, man, they are not easy — I can’t even get my main squad to 85, let alone three times and then several more times in even higher ratings than that. The 89 squads will likely need you to spend big in the transfer market, which itself is a huge grind, or part ways with your best players and maybe even some Icons.
What makes this crazier is that other boosted cards via SBCs have only required 4 or 5 SBCs to unlock — even a 88 rated POTM Serie A Koulibaly only takes 4 SBCs. Ronaldo takes over six times as many SBCs as Koulibaly and his card is “only” four points higher — it’s madness.
What makes this even weirder is that there’s even a Ones To Watch Ronaldo card that could become better than the POTM one in no time at all as long as Manchester United keep winning matches, which is pretty much a given. While that card is very expensive at 2-4 million FIFA Coins, it’s still probably cheaper than building 26 elite squads and basically recycling them over and over again, and it will almost inevitably become better than the POTM Ronaldo card.
This Ronaldo SBC bonanza is obviously EA panicking slightly and putting up an absolute tonne of roadblocks to stop the community from just amassing one of the best strikers in the game. While it won’t put everyone off, I know for a fact that I’d rather watch the man do a million stepovers on my grave than even start on this ridiculous timesink.
FIFA 22 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X | S.
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