Sorare Set strategy: how to maximise HyperGlitch

If you have read the getting-started guide you know how HyperGlitch works. This is about how to actually win at it. Everything below is what I would tell myself on day one.

The honest outlook

Getting to the money and the £100 target is 100% possible on free to play. Genuinely. 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. A Gold pack is essentially a 50/50 shot at an Icon with a minimum star level guaranteed so even then you're going to need to open a fair few to get the roster to hit that 480 target. It also has the best odds of a special edition card by a distance and those make your chances so much better too.

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. LaLiga has eight Icons in HyperGlitch and six of them are Barcelona players: Joan García, Pau Cubarsí, Pedri, Lamine Yamal, Raphinha and Rodrigo (the other two are Bellingham and Mbappé). These are the real Sorare scores for the best five of them over Barcelona's last four LaLiga games, with a captain on the best of them (+50%) and the full 5% club collection bonus, and no special editions.

Breaking it down:

• The £100 (440) is reachable with the Icons and nothing else. Athletic at home did it. Valencia away easily did it.
• The £1,000 (480) needs a special edition on top. Valencia away lands on 467 with no card edition bonuses. A single Holo Static Fracture (+20%, the edition bonuses are in the guide) on Pedri adds 17 and you are on 484.
• 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 gets you to 495 with no editions at all. 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. This Set is around 50 days, that's at least 50 opportunities to enter teams, probably more like 100 accounting for fixture timings.

There will be another Set after 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, 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.

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. If you want to be one of them, you need to stack them too.

Completing collections is properly hard. The single easiest way to build a stack is the Live Today Bronze pack on a day when only a premium team is playing. 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 Bronze pool is a handful of elite clubs. On launch day it was City, Real Madrid, Dortmund, Betis, Villarreal and Aston Villa for 1,000 Essence. A random league Bronze might give you an Ipswich defender as its top card. No offence to the tractor boys.

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.

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.

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 and settle early

A level settles the moment your lineup passes the target, even if one of your cards has not played yet. That opens up a trick that gets you more steps out of one day.

On a Champions League night there are two windows, 17:45 and 20:00. Put four cards from a 17:45 game in the lineup and a fifth from a 20:00 game. If the four clear the target on their own, the level pays out at about half past seven with the fifth card on zero, and that card is free to go again in your next lineup for the 20:00 games. If the four fall short, the fifth card still plays at 20:00 and can rescue it.

Here is a real one of mine on step 2 (300 points, 5,000 Essence): Anthony Gordon, Rodri, Jules Koundé and Pedri as captain, all Barcelona, all playing Feyenoord at 17:45, plus Jan Oblak in goal for Atlético against Liverpool at 20:00. I have no Barcelona goalkeeper, so the plan is that the four Barcelona players hit 300 without Oblak. If they do, the step is settled and Oblak is available again for the 20:00 lineup on step 3.

This is the exception to "only enter when you know the lineups": high-percentage starters in a split stack, where the late card is a bonus, not a dependency.

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 Static Fracture 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 lives on a level 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. 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, so you can do the sums:

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: 59 goalkeepers out of 698 players in the Set. 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 time round we had 1,500 Essence Bronze packs with increased Shiny odds, one-purchase packs limited to a specific fixture (100 Essence for a set five-player squad from a marquee game), and more.

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. The Set invite ladder pays you 500 Essence when a friend signs up, 1,000 at their first lineup, 2,000 and 5,000 Essence if they complete levels 1 and 2 on the ladder. Any more and you start earning gems!

Read next

The getting-started guide, the daily routine and how the player score is built.