Today, Sorare have released their Roadmap for the 2023/24 European season. Alongside some exciting social additions and new longer term competitions, there are a number of changes affecting gameplay in the core bi-weekly competitions. Most importantly all card bonuses have been added to Capped Mode competitions with the exception of the scarcity bonuses for Super Rare and Unique cards. There is also a 20% captain bonus that will apply in all Capped Mode competitions and a new Fitness Bonus.

Fitness Bonus

Fitness Bonus maxes out at 10% and is gradually reduced the more often you use a card in SO5 competitions. If player isn’t used in a game week, or doesn’t play for their club, their fitness bonus will recover slightly. To further manage the fitness bonus, users will be able to send players to a new ‘physio centre’ where the fitness bonus will recover faster. There is also the option to purchase ‘Rest Packs’ in the Sorare store, either with coins or money to increase the recovery rate on cards.

We don’t know how fast Fitness will be reduced and recover at this point. My expectation, and this is pure speculation, is that fitness will slowly reduce if you use a player once a week. Given they are selling boosts, I think it makes sense that you’ll need to get boosts to maintain maximum fitness for each weekend game week. You’ll certainly need boosts for the star players that are in mid week and weekend action regularly!

At first glance I’m wasn’t keen on the fitness bonus changes, the similar card condition mechanic on Ultimate Champions put me off the platform. Having said that, given the boosts can be acquired through socoins and the fitness recovery from not using players I think it might be a positive addition to the platform. The extra revenue stream for Sorare should at least increase user confidence in the sustainability of the platform. Maybe we’ll even see prize-pool increases if the boosts are popular!

How do the changes affect Threshold Strategy?

The points required to win a threshold reward in Cap 240 has risen to 300 points to account for the scoring bonuses. At first glance that looks challenging, we need our line-up to score 25% more than their L15 averages if we fill the budget. But if we start to break it down a bit it doesn’t look too bad. The captain bonus is effectively a 4% bonus to our score (20% / 5 players), but can be significantly more if we get the right player. So we’re looking for an average 21% boost on each card in the gallery.

Fitness and new season bonus can account for 15% of that if we have full fitness. That leaves us chasing 6% from a mixture of card experience and collection bonus. A 2% collection bonus is very achievable and a 3% is too hard either, especially for teams you’d like to stack. So with 3-4% to make from experience boost, that’s really achievable after a few weeks of training a card. With some variation of this approach you’d be able to hit a threshold if your squad just met their L15 average scores.

In the current Capped Mode competitions we look to hit the 250 point mark with no score boosts of any sorts. If you can continue to hit a raw 250 points then the boost required drops to 20% to hit 300 points. Taking away the Captain bonus that drops it down to 16%, very much achievable even with previous season’s cards. If you can get a better than average return on your captain, that required boost drops even further.

The changes are more important for the other Capped competitions or if you’re targeting card rewards in Cap 240. In which case, maximising your bonuses will be key to getting as high into the prizes as possible. Planning your game weeks to have players at maximum fitness bonus will be important if you want to reach the Tier 1 and Star rewards.

Should we adjust our Gallery Composition?

If you’re building a gallery to earn threshold rewards, these changes should definitely alter your approach slightly. First off, having players that can hit peak scores to be your captain is going to be really important. Previously I have favoured players with a consistent but not necessarily explosive scoring split to get reliable scoring differentials. However, with the bigger gap between the Cap and threshold, nailing that 20% bonus will be important to give you a bit more wiggle room in the other four players.

If I was building a gallery for thresholds now I’d be looking to get a 2% collection bonus on cards where possible. The preference would be to do that through new card auctions so you can get there with three cards. If it’s a good team, grabbing 5 players from the manager sales might be worth it for the 2% as well.

If you’re going for the cards from auctions, you get the benefit of the 5% current season bonus which is nice. If you go for the second hand cards from manager sales, especially from previous seasons, targeting cards with high experience bonuses will be important to keep scores high.

If you’re looking to purely maximise the number of thresholds you win, a wide gallery is going to be important as well. That way you can ‘rest’ cards to keep the fitness bonus high. This obviously depends on exactly how the mechanics of recovering fitness will work and how expensive the boosts are in coins. However, you may get a better return on your investment if you don’t go too crazy buying cards!

If you haven’t signed up to Sorare and fancy giving it a go, sign up via this referral link and earn a free limited card when you collect five cards via New Card Auctions.