Guide · 6 min read

How FPL Rivals cards work

An FPL season is thirty-eight weekly scores, and most of them are forgotten by the next deadline. The cards are a way of keeping the good ones, and the bad ones, as something you can look back through.

Where cards come from

After every gameweek, once the game has confirmed the final bonus points, FPL Rivals reads what each player in your squad did that week. A player earns a card when he does something worth remembering: a haul, a hat-trick, a clean sheet with bonus, a goal against one of the best sides in the league. Nothing is made up. Every card is built from the game's published scores for that week and your own team as you picked it.

One player earns at most one card a week, however many things he did. The card is named after the most impressive of them, and the rest are listed on the card as the other feats it counts towards.

Some cards aren't about one player at all. A week in the top 100,000 of the whole game, a score forty points above the average, or passing 1,000 points for the season each earn a card about your whole team. And some are about clubs: a side you'd picked players from winning by five, say.

Finishes and pips

Every card has a finish, and every finish sits on a scale of one to five pips. Matte is one pip and covers the everyday returns: a brace, maximum bonus, ten to fourteen points. Gloss is two, for a fifteen-point haul. Speckle is three, Holo is four for things like hat-tricks and a full house of goal, assist and clean sheet, and Prismatic is five, kept for the rarest weeks of all. The pips are how hard the card was to earn.

A handful of five-pip cards have their own names and designs. The Masterstroke is for captaining the highest-scoring player in the whole game that week. The Heist is for a bench player who outscored every starter you picked. The Century is for a hundred-point week.

Then there are Cursed cards, which have no pips at all. They record the weeks that went wrong: an own goal, a red card, a captain who played and scored two, fifteen points left on the bench. They're part of the season too.

Captain and bench

A card shows how close the player was to you that week. A captain's card carries a gold ribbon and shows the points you actually got from him, doubled, or tripled for a Triple Captain. A card earned from your bench is greyed out: it shows what he scored, but those points didn't count for you, so its pips don't count towards anything either. The one exception is the Heist, which exists precisely because of the bench.

How rare is a card?

Tap any player card and it tells you how many managers hold that exact card. Because the card is about a player's week, everyone who had him that week holds it, and the version depends on how they had him. If a striker scored a hat-trick while owned by 40% of managers and captained by 15%, then 40% hold the card, but only 15% hold the captained version.

Those figures come from FPL Rivals' own weekly sample of around fifteen thousand managers, spread across every rank band and weighted by how many managers each band really contains, so the top thousand don't count as much as the millions below them.

Parallels

Any card can occasionally come in a rare parallel finish: Cracked Ice, about one card in twelve; Gold, about one in forty; and Black Onyx, about one in a hundred and fifty. A parallel is fixed to the card, so the same week always comes out the same way. It's pure luck, and it doesn't change the pips.

What you can do with a binder

Collect the sets. Four sets run through the season: every look and finish, every Premier League club's crest, the six named chase cards, and a medal table with bronze, silver and gold for each of the fifty-five feats. The common feats need five, twenty-five and fifty for their medals, so they're a season-long chase rather than something finished in August.

Build an eleven. The Season XI sets your best card for each player into the strongest legal formation automatically. My XI lets you pick your own.

Show them off. Every manager's profile shows their three best cards, and a league page can open every member's binder side by side, with a card of the gameweek for the best pull anyone in the league made.

Cards live on the Cards tab of My Team. The first time you open it, the season's packs are opened for you, best pull last. For the scoring rules behind many of the feats, read How bonus points work and Fixture difficulty ratings.