SBCs have been the best part of FIFA 17

FIFA Ultimate Team players have been packing, buying, and selling their way toward building a top-tier club since EA launched FUT way back in the day.

This year’s game gave fans one massive addition to FIFA Ultimate Team: Squad. Building. Challenges.

Even if you’re a casual FUT player, by now you’ve surely poked around and completed at least few basic challenges and earned yourself some packs, kits, and other rewards unique to SBCs like untradeable players..

For those of you who have been hesitant to check out the SBCs, it’s a new facet of FUT 17 where you can exchange squads of players that meet certain chemistry, nationality, league, overall and/or team requirements for insane rewards.

Some challenges are a part of wider sets that EA calls “groups.” Completing all of the challenges within a particular group will earn you even bigger rewards.

The intricacy of some challenges due to chemistry requirements, paired with trying to complete them with combinations of current players in your club and purchasing players on the transfer market, makes solving the puzzles frustrating yet also rewarding.

Especially now, as we head into the ‘Team Of The Season’ (TOTS) portion of the FIFA calendar. The ability to complete SBCs to earn a pack, with a chance to pull a TOTS card, is a complete game-changer in FIFA. While we don’t know what the TOTS challenges will be or what the exact rewards will be for competing them, we saw with various other challenges how rewarding completing them can be.

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For example, the PFA ‘Player of the Year’ and ‘Young Player of the Year’ SBCs which yielded Special award winners Dele Alli and N’Golo Kanté cards, with separate challenges to earn loan versions of each player.

SBCs have also totally revolutionized the FUT transfer market in this year’s game, skyrocketing the value of many silver, bronze, and gold cards because of the necessity to purchase them to complete specific challenges.

The addition of live challenges throughout the season has fluctuated the market and keeps card collectors on their toes about when to buy and sell, but also about when to stash players away in your club for future SBC use.

The FIFA companion app even featured the ability to complete SBCs so you can take on a challenge to earn rewards wherever you are. The drag and drop functionality of it makes it my preferred method to complete them.

At first, spending upwards of 100K coins to purchase a team needed to complete a more advanced SBC may give you some sticker shock. But, if you’re smart about which players you use to complete them, or use community generated guides from Futhead, you can get premium packs and other rewards at bargain bin value.

EA’s best addition to FIFA since launching Ultimate Team has been the addition of SBCs and they’re only getting better. And more rewarding.