While I’m trying to get my FI portfolio restructured, I thought I might as well start on my Footstock side challenge. The premise is simple – if I was a beginner on here, how far could I get with just £100?

I want to make this as much as possible like a beginner’s experience so I’ve enlisted my wife’s help. She’s often asks why I spend so much time staring at my phone so I’ve invited her to get involved and have a go herself, with a bit of tuition from me. It’s her £100 on the line, so possibly my marriage as well if I balls this up!

New users are given 50 bonus cards on sign up. These are set to expire after one month and have no actual value. I was pretty happy with the spread of these as a starting point – here’s some of the highest rated:

The next step was to head to the ‘shop’ and purchase some packs. These are a real gamble and generally it’s much better to buy from the market, but I’m pretty sure that most beginners put some money into packs before they realise this. I’d committed to spending no more than 50% of the initial investment on packs so, with the recent increase in pack prices, we went for one £29.99 pack and two £6.99 packs:

I think we can be more than happy with the result of that. The value of the £29.99 pack is around £45. The two £6.99 packs have far less player value (around £4.60 altogether) but the deposit bonus more than makes up for it – if we end up using it of course. Either way, my marriage looks safe so far.

That’s enough gambling for now. I’m steering well clear of roulette and the virtual tournaments. You can win big but you can also lose big, and that remaining £50 I’m working with could quickly disappear.

So what is the strategy? While I have the 50 extra bonus cards, it makes sense to target tournaments as much as possible. Next week is stacked with freerolls and we’ve got 14 beginner tournament coupons to use as well. It seems logical to work on building up some decent common (2 star) cards for now, flipping where possible to make small profits, and hope for some tourney wins along the way.

When buying from the market, I’m suggesting pitching the bids a bit below the current sell price, leaving plenty of room to flip. I guess that the cheapest players at the moment are likely to be those without any tournament action coming up – a quick glance tells me that these are Chelsea, Spurs, West Ham and Brighton players – so it may be worth putting some especially cheeky bids on these.

A couple of quick beginner observations – the app is looking pretty sleek now and the hints and tips as you move through it are really helpful for a new user. Having the ‘value’ of the bonus cards included in the collection value is pretty misleading though – these cards have no actual value and, in my opinion, should count for zero here.