One month into playing Cap 220 Limited as a DFS game and it’s not been the start I’d hoped for. Unfortunately, there haven’t been any SO5 successes to date and I haven’t really been that close either. On the bright side, I still have a pretty healthy amount of cash on hand and taking into account the floor price of the cards I still have, I’m down less than 10% so far.

Cash on Hand	£15.92
Gallery Floor Price	£11.96
Profit / Loss	-£2.72 (-9.1%)

I’m going to take a look through what’s worked well and what hasn’t over the last month. I don’t want to make massive changes to my strategy too early on, but we’ll see if there’s any adjustments I should be making for the next month’s entries.

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The SO5 Results

Overall, not what I was hoping for in the first month of this challenge. In the four weekend game weeks I’ve entered so far, the closest I’ve came to a prize is 37.5 points away!

I’m not too disheartened so far, GW #401 was obviously a shocker thanks to a goalkeeper DNP, but the others have at least outscored the cap. There have been some players that haven’t gone to plan at all. However, there have been others where the game script has been right but the scores just haven’t came off.

Despite getting the pick of the top 5 leagues, my goalkeeper picks haven’t performed very well so far. There was the Terraciano DNP in GW401, but at least that was in a line-up that wasn’t going anywhere if he did manage the clean sheet. From the three playing goalkeepers, I’ve managed just the one clean sheet from Yann Sommer. Hradecky did come close last weekend, but conceded his only goal on target. This is definitely somewhere I’d like to be more consistent given the options available to pick from.

My defenders have also been hit and miss, twice I’ve managed to get a positive return on the cap cost. Of the two that didn’t provide a positive return, one of them made only a substitute appearance. The two positive performance were both double digit returns, whilst he negatives were both single digits.

I’ve definitely had the most success with my midfielders picks, 5 out of 6 have outscored their cost, with only Ryan Strain in GW 397 failing to do so. Four of the midfield choices have outscored their cost by double digit points. Antoine Leautey was the best performer of any card, his goal and assist got him up to 82.2 from a cost of 38.

My forwards have been a particular disappointment and have probably have a lot to do with the poor performances. With the limited budget I have been trying to target forwards with a good chances at either scoring or assisting to get them to the 60 points mark. This is based on the assumption forwards that produce reliable good AA scores will be too expensive both against the cap and in cash.

From the 6 forward cards I have played so far, I have achieved one assist and zero goals. To make things worse, when Lazaros Lamprou did get his assist he also got himself sent off so I didn’t benefit from it regardless. Overall just one of six has outscored his cost, and that was by 0.1 points!

The Gallery

So the results haven’t been great, but let’s look through how buying and selling cards is going.

Over the first couple of weeks of the season I did a pretty good job at moving cards on quickly. It was boosted a bit by my line-ups being obviously dead quite early on which lead to me cancelling them to sell during the gameweeks. From the 6 cards I have sold, I’ve brought in a profit of £4.55 which helps to offset some of the cards I’m still holding. One thing to consider is that I’ve only sold at profit so far – in some cases I maybe should have taken a loss to move other cards out of the gallery quicker. Definitely something to bear in mind over the next few weeks.

Currently my gallery consists of 8 cards with a combined floor price of £11.96, down £6.67 from when I purchased them. It’s not exactly in the spirit of playing Cap 220 as a DFS game to hold players this long, but for the most part they have been listed for sale. If I’d done better at picking players that perform well, I’d have been able to move them on a bit easier – so in a lot of ways my failings above cause these issues. I do have the back-up option of packaging cards to a trader if needed but I will keep trying to move them on the market for the time being.

There’s also a couple of players who might be fit into a line-up over the next couple of weeks, such as Hearts’ Alex Cochrane who I think is still very underpriced against the cap.

Lessons Learnt

When building the line-ups, I’ve gone cheap from a cash perspective so far. This has been to allow me to have cash on hand to get cards for the next weekend even if the cards from the last weekend haven’t sold yet. Whether I’d have done any better by going all-in on a weekend is hard to say in hindsight. But it might be worth being less budget conscious, even if it means I have to skip some weekends whilst I move other players on.

My best success has come with midfield cards and my worst with forwards. So for the Extra spot in the line-up midfield will be my focus going forward. Most importantly I need to avoid extra forwards – they’re more volatile and more expensive. It also help manage the budget as forwards are typically the most expensive position to purchase.

I am generally selecting players that make sense to other Sorare players. For the most part I have been trying to buy players over the weekend for the following weekends game week. In most cases I have seen the prices rise above what I paid heading up to the gameweek starting. In some ways this is a bit of validation that my player choices make sense, even if the results haven’t been there. I don’t want to take too much from this though, picking the players that make sense to everyone doesn’t necessarily mean they are the right picks.

Going Forwards

I’m sticking with the plan for now and hopefully the results will come in September. I’m not too far down from my starting budgets and I think prices of the cards I still have should rebound a little once the international break is over. I’ve got £15.92 cash on hand, so I shouldn’t have any issues building for the first week back from the break either.

There’s definitely questions to answer about how the introduction of scoring bonuses will affect my chances. With collection, experience and captain bonuses being introduced this month, I expect I will be behind some of the competition in this regard. I’m unlikely to have any collection bonuses for my cards and I expect the experience bonuses will be lower than average as well. Nailing the captain choice will likely be pretty important for this, so spending a little extra cash to get the player with the best shot at a peak score might be worth doing.

Finally, the potential of a pure trading strategy is interesting. If I had sold my cards on the Thursday before the gameweek locked I’d have made much more profit than playing each week. For now I want to keep attempting to play Cap 220 as a DFS alternative, but it could be a fun alternative if the addition of bonuses makes winning rewards a lot more challenging.

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.