Sorare Set strategy: how to maximise Divination

If you have read the Divination getting-started guide you know how the Set works. This is about how to actually win at it. I wrote it for HyperGlitch, won the £100 and the £1,000 that Set, and have updated it for Divination. Everything below is what I would tell myself on day one.

The honest outlook

Getting to the money and the £100 target is still possible on free to play, but it is harder in Divination than it was last Set. The £1,000 is borderline impossible without a decent spend on gems or literally the stars aligning for you.

The main reason is that the maths on Level 6 wants 480 points from five cards, meaning 80+ on all your players and a 100 point scoring captain. A free-to-play player is never going to own all the Stars and Icons needed for that, because the Icon odds in Bronze and even Silver packs are far too slim.

Icons come out of Gold packs, and Gold packs cost 50 Gems. In HyperGlitch a Gold pack was roughly a 50/50 shot at an Icon. In Divination it is 41%, and LaLiga's Icons went from eight to 15, so any one of them is about 2.7% per Gold pack. You need a lot of Gold packs to land the specific Icons that make a stack. Gold still has the best odds of a special edition card by a distance, and with the collection bonus gone, special editions matter more than ever.

In short, the whole game at the top of the ladder is: how do you get Gems, and what do you do with them.

What a Barcelona stack really scores

Do not take my word for it. In HyperGlitch LaLiga had eight Icons and six of them were Barcelona players: Joan García, Pau Cubarsí, Pedri, Lamine Yamal, Raphinha and Rodrigo (the other two were Bellingham and Mbappé). These are the real Sorare scores for the best five of them over four LaLiga games at the start of HyperGlitch, with a captain on the best of them (+50%), the old 5% club collection bonus, and no special editions. Divination has no collection bonus, so the numbers below take it off.

Here's how it breaks down for Divination.

• The £100 (440) is reachable with the Icons alone, but only just. Take the collection bonus off and Athletic at home drops from 446 to about 427 and misses. Valencia away is about 447 and still clears.
• The £1,000 (480) needs special editions on top, plural. Valencia away is about 447 with no bonuses. A Holo Eclipse (+20%, the edition bonuses are in the guide) on Pedri adds 17 and you are on 464, still short. Last Set one edition got you there. This Set you need two or three, or a better fifth player.
• One DNP ends the attempt. Cubarsí did not play at Elche and the whole lineup scored 326. That is why you only enter when you know the lineups.

Hindsight is 20-20, so obviously adding Fermín (95.4) in the extra slot instead of Raphinha against Valencia adds 26, and with the Holo Eclipse on Pedri you are on about 491. The ceiling is there. Owning the cards to reach it is the hard part, and without a good Gem spend it's hard to have all those Icons in your collection.

Two roads to the top of the ladder

Free to play: farm Gems, then go long

The ladder pays Gems at level 3 (10) and level 4 (30), and it pays them every time you pass those levels (the full board is in the guide). Spinning through the early levels quickly and burning lives to get there is a genuine strategy: you are farming Gems, and every 50 is a Gold pack.

Then be honest about the timeline. Divination runs to 6 January, about 60 days from when I'm writing this, so that's at least 60 opportunities to enter teams, probably more like 100 accounting for fixture timings.

There will be another Set after Divination, and your unspent Gems carry over (they did from HyperGlitch). If you are completely free to play, saving every Gem for the next Set and opening a run of Gold packs on day one could be your best shot at a proper go at the £100 and the £1,000. Playing the long game is how a free account ever fields five Icons.

If that's your strategy of choice, then obviously still go for the £100 if you get to that level, but saving your lives for 2 weeks because City are at home to Ipswich is a stretch and you are missing out on 2-3 more attempts at the lower levels.

Spending Gems: Gold packs, early

If you are a Gem fiend and you spend, spend matters more this Set than last. Focus on Gold packs early. Icons are just that. Do not underestimate them. An Icon with a bonus edition (the highest drop rate by far in Gold packs) is what can get you the magic 480.

The other spend worth knowing about is the Live Today Silver pack on the right day, which is the next section.

Stack the big four

Every "I won £1,000 playing Sorare" picture you see on X is a Barcelona, Real Madrid, PSG or Bayern stack. Mine was three Bayern players from a 6-1. If you want to be one of them, you need to stack them too.

Completing collections is properly hard, and harder again now there are more Icons in the pool. The single easiest way to build a stack is the Live Today pack on a day when only a premium team is playing. Bronze if you're free to play, Silver if you're spending. Last week, before the Set was live, there was a day where Real Madrid were the only team playing. Hammering Bronze packs that day would have meant every Star or Icon you pulled was a Real Madrid player, and an extremely valuable one to have in your roster.

Champions League nights are good for the same reason: the Live Today pool is a handful of elite clubs. On HyperGlitch's launch day it was City, Real Madrid, Dortmund, Betis, Villarreal and Aston Villa. A random league pack might give you an Ipswich defender as its top card. No offence to the tractor boys. If you are spending Gems, Live Today Silver on a Champions League night is the best use of 10 Gems in the Set.

And look ahead to Christmas. The Premier League plays through Boxing Day and New Year while the Bundesliga is on its winter break, so English players carry the last fortnight of the Set. A Premier League stack built in December will have a lot of fixtures to itself.

Play the ladder in two gears

Early levels and early days are quantity, not quality. Open as much Essence as you can at the start and field teams in numbers. Levels 1 to 3 are cheap, the targets are reachable with a couple of decent scores, and a restart costs you nothing.

Be ambitious on the first two levels and blast through them. You do not need five cards to enter: 4-man teams clear levels 1 and 2 with relative ease, and a 3-man team on level 1 is possible and worth a go, because failing on level 1 leaves you exactly where you were, on level 1, free to reset your teams and go again. You can have up to four teams in a step at once, so use them all.

The last three levels are quality. Play them slow. Barcelona at home to a poor LaLiga side is the play to hit 440, not the Manchester derby. Play smart, play patient. The Divination fixture planner rates every game to 6 January so you can see those fixtures coming.

Only ever enter when you know the lineups. The one exception is very high percentage starters in split stacks. A lineup locks the moment one of its players kicks off, so set your alarms for the hour before each window and swap anyone who is benched.

Split the kick-offs across your four teams

You can have up to four teams in a step at once, and the first one over the target wins it. Every other team still open in that step is voided and its cards free up. That is the trick that gets you more steps out of one day in Divination.

On a Champions League night there are two windows, 17:45 and 20:00. Put your best teams in the 17:45 games and an insurance team in the 20:00 games. If a 17:45 team clears the target, the step pays out at about quarter to eight, the 20:00 team is voided, and its cards are free to go again in your next step for the 20:00 games. If the 17:45 teams fall short, the 20:00 team still has a go.

One thing changed from HyperGlitch. Last Set I would put four players from a 17:45 game in one lineup with a fifth from 20:00, and the lineup could settle on the four alone. In Divination a team with a card in a later game stays open until that game is played, so keep each team to one window and split across teams instead.

The step closes about two hours after kick-off, once the scores are confirmed. If you are going straight into the next step, pick games that kick off at least two and a quarter hours after the games you are relying on.

Squads are not optional

Hitting 400 plus is going to rely on special edition players, and squad reward packs are the only place in the game to get guaranteed special editions for free. A 20% Holo Eclipse card for the last level is a godsend. Find a squad in the Sorare Discord, or make one with friends, and submit a squad team every single day. Miss it and you get kicked.

Scrapping is an art

Never scrap one and two-star players. The return is 20 Essence. You would have to scrap fifty two-stars to buy one Bronze pack. The maths is rubbish, so do not bother.

Duplicates at one and two stars are useful anyway. With four teams allowed on a step you can field four Aston Villa teams for their early kick-off, different combinations of the same players and different captains, in the hope one of them lands 260 on level 1. That is worth far more than 20 Essence a card.

Three, four and five-star is where it gets nuanced. Players move between tiers freely, and the Star and Icon pool is hand-picked. (Set tiers are now separate from Pro tiers, which is why Sorare closed crafting for a while at the start of Divination.) Hold ten two-star Alejandro Garnacho duplicates now and they are worth 200 Essence, a fifth of a Bronze pack. If he scores in the next game and goes up a tier, the same ten cards are 2,000 Essence, two packs. If he goes on a tear and gets put in the Star pool at four stars, you are looking at 20,000 Essence for your Garnachos: twenty packs.

So if someone is playing brilliantly and you hold four copies of his three-star card, the 800 Essence in your pocket today, not even a pack, could be 8,000 in a fortnight and eight whole packs. Be sensible and be smart here.

The one limit: do not hold more than two of the same Icon. It is extremely rare you would ever need more than two, and even the second is often not useful. That Essence is better spent on Live Today Bronze packs on a premium-team day.

Scrap values per star from HyperGlitch, so you can do the sums (check the in-game value before you scrap, it can differ by card):

Goalkeepers are the most important cards in the game

Every lineup needs one, every stack needs the right one, and there are far fewer of them in the pool. HyperGlitch had 59 goalkeepers out of 698 players. A keeper who plays every game for a side that keeps clean sheets is a 60 floor you need for the top targets.

So the scrapping rule is different for keepers. Do not discard goalkeeper duplicates. Keep up to three of the same one. You will use them across multiple lineups on the same day far more often than you think.

And be patient. Sorare normally releases a cheap, Gem-priced goalkeeper-specific pack once the community has complained about the keeper shortage loudly enough. It happened last Set. When it appears, that is the Gem spend that fixes your whole roster in one go.

The top goalkeepers are all stars and icons, so unfortunately another stumbling block for any f2p player. Joan García, Courtois, Neuer and Safonov are all Stars and Icons. Those gold packs become a requirement for the full stack of top teams.

Check in during the day, not just in the morning

The Market is not static. Sorare throw surprise packs into the Set without warning, and they are often the best value you will see all Set. Last Set we had 1,500 Essence Bronze packs with increased Shiny odds and one-purchase packs limited to a specific fixture (100 Essence for a set five-player squad from a marquee game). This Set has already brought a Shiny+ Silver pack, every card Shiny or better for 15 Gems, and it looks like those are here to stay.

They tend to drop during the day, not overnight, so a morning-only check misses them. The daily routine covers the morning; add a second look at the Market in the afternoon and before the evening kick-offs, and treat a fixture-specific 100 Essence squad as an automatic buy, the players will scrap for more.

Referrals: up to 200 Gems per friend

This is some easy essence/gems if you've got some mates who love FPL. In Divination each friend's invite ladder pays you 500, 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000 Essence as they sign up, play and climb, then 15, 40, 50 and 200 Gems as they go further. The figure below is last Set's, and the shape is the same.

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The Divination getting-started guide, the daily routine and how the player score is built. Fancy a football game with no pack luck at all? Try Footium for free.