Alright boys and girls, here's
Mike's Guide to HUT Auctions and Collections (
and how to hopefully get a good player real quick)
QUICK NOTE: If you think you know enough about HUT Auction and Collections, scroll down to
ATTENTION to learn how to get a couple quick free gold packs... but if you're at all unsure about the ins and outs of HUT and Auctions and Collections I highly recommend you read the whole post.
So, as you know one way to get cards in Hockey Ultimate Team (HUT) is by purchasing packs (either with coins earned or real money). Another way to get cards is by getting them in the auction (either by bidding, by buying them at a "buy now" price, or by offering a trade). However, there's a third way that a lot of people starting out don't take advantage of: Collections.
On the first screen of HUT, you're automatically highlighting your "Collections" bar. Go into it. In there you'll see search options (by league, but also by card type if you want). Go into NHL and then any random team. By now you probably have at least one or two players on most teams.
If you collect every "card" for a team, then you get bonus gold packs for free. That's what we're going for here.
However, by "every card" I don't mean just the players. You have to collect every jersey card (there are between 4 - 10 jerseys per team) and the team's logo card. You do
not have to collect the arena card, nor any special cards (ie a Joe Sakic legends card is not needed for Colorado). Additionally, special cards do not count towards collections (so if you get a PK Subban "Team of the Week" card, that won't count... but that's still a damn good card!).
How do you collect entire teams? Auctions, mainly. But we'll get to that in a second.
If you browse your "Collections" NHL teams tab, you'll notice that some teams reward more gold packs than others, even though the amount of cards is the same. Why? Simply, some teams have better (and thus more expensive) players than others. Calgary is one of the "cheapest" teams to collect because they don't have any bonafide superstars like Crosby or Ovechkin on their team. They do have a couple slightly pricey dudes, but nothing insane. Same with New Jersey and a few other teams. So basically it's going to cost you a lot more coins to outright buy Chicago's full team (thanks to Toews, Kane, Keith, etc) than it is a team like Buffalo. Chicago will get you more packs, but the tradeoff most likely isn't worth it.
So yeah, you're going for the "cheapest" teams early on. And as mentioned, you're going to get the vast majority of a team through auction.
QUICK NOTE: Right now, prices in the auction marketplace are fluctuating (and are most likely higher than they will be in a few months) because there are way less cards out there (because the game just came out). So while collecting full teams is a great way to get cards, it might not actually be a great time to go for full teams yet. But there is something you CAN do right now, which I'll get into in a moment...
So how do we auction successfully? First, identify a player you need for the team you're collecting. Let's say we're collecting Calgary and we need a Mark Giordano. How do we know that we need a Giordano? Simple. We go to this website...
http://nhlguides.net/nhl-16-collection-checklists/
...which has a list of every card you need to complete a team! What a handy site. If you have cookies turned on, you can actually use it as a checklist.
So we need Giordano. We find him on that site (M. GIORDANO - LD) and see that he's a left defenceman. So, we go into the auction, do a search, and search for NHL team CALGARY and search for LEFT DEFENCEMAN. This will bring up all of Calgary's LD's, but we want to shrink the search for just Giordano. How do we do that? Simply inspect one of Giordano's cards that pop up. Upon inspecting, we can see that he's listed as a TWO WAY FORWARD. We can also see that he's CANADIAN. Usually by entering those two criteria (player type and nationality) you can whittle a search down to one player.
So now we've got nothing but Giordano's. Which one do we buy? The first one? No. Almost always the answer to that is no. Here's why.
Some people who are new to HUT will put their cards up for auction at below market value. Those are the cards we want to get for multiple reasons (which I'll get to). However, if a card is put up for under market value, it's almost definitely not going to make it to the front of the list. Why? Because the list is ordered sequentially in terms of auctions that are about to expire... and that means that cards at the front of the list have been available for at LEAST 50+ minutes (if not 2 hours and 50+ minutes, if not 5 hours and 50+ minutes, etc). If they've made it that long without being bought, there's a good chance it's because the price is too high.
So which ones are we looking for? You guessed it: the cards that were
just posted right before you did your search. You'll find those cards at these times: ~59 minutes, ~2 hours and 59 minutes, etc... Is it a guarantee that you'll find a better deal at those times? No. However, more often than not that's where your card will be.
So let's say you've saved up enough coins and subsequently purchased an entire team's collection with those coins using frugal bidding. Congrats! You now have free gold packs to open. You cannot sell any of the cards from those gold packs, but you should hopefully get some good players! Now what?
You sell all of the cards from that team you collected. And you know what the great part is? You sell them for market value, meaning overall you're actually going to make a profit from all this. Which is neat.
But Mike, you say, you said that it's actually not the best time to collect teams right now since market prices are inflated. You're right, I did say that. However, there are two teams that you can collect right now super easily that won't break the bank...
ATTENTION: You can collect both All-Star teams and earn a free gold pack for each of them. Why is this easy? Because an All-Star team "collection" is literally 7 cards (6 jerseys, 1 logo). If you use the bidding method I mentioned above, an entire team should cost less than 5000 coins. And you'll get a free gold pack out of it (and re-sell your items for a slight profit, then collect the other team).
That's how I got my rare Luc Robitaille, and I've seen other people get pretty darn good cards out of it too.
So, is there more to HUT auctions and collections? Yes, but those are the basics to get you started. If you guys have any other questions feel free to ask.
