Madden NFL 12

I decided to write a guide to highlight some of the strategies i used as well as the pitfalls i encountered. Here are the cliff notes:

1) Set the game up in your favour. My solution adds a few points to the guide that CoolJoeItaliano's wrote
2) Play 24 games with the team you start with. Don't buy cards until you have played 24 games. If you buy cards and put them in your lineup, their contracts will expire and you will waste time and money (coins, not real money) getting them back into your lineup.
3) Once you have played 24 games, decide how to spend your money put the players in and hope you get a rating of 80.

Long version:

Game setup:

CoolJoeItaliano's solution outlines a few tips on how to setup your game. I'm going to repeat/expand upon that solution.

1) All-madden difficulty - Do not touch the player sliders. You can change the CPU sliders, kicking power sliders and offsides in your favour. .

2) Game length - 5 minute quarters maximizes the coins. There is no bonus to play longer and there is minimal bonuses for scoring a lot of points. And playing 4 minutes incurs a pretty stiff penalty so leave it at 5 minutes

3) Accelerated Clock - Leave it on and set the timer to 10 seconds. This means that after you select a play, there will only be 10 seconds on the game clock. This will speed up the games. Please note, this does not apply after the 2 minute warning and i will cover that later in the solution.

Playing style:

1) Defence - The sure fire way to win the game is to turn offsides off and sit in the backfield. You can also use this to tackle punters and kickers. The clock will keep moving since it is a running play. This will give you great field position and allow you to score when the ball is turned over. There is only one downside and i will cover that when i talk about coins collected per game.

2) Offence - To speed up the games, run as much as possible. If your play ends in an incomplete pass, the clock doesn't move. Believe me, you are going to want to keep the clock moving. I used the gameflow to select plays and whenever i got a passing play, i just ran with the QB. I was surprised have effective this was at gaining yards. However,
your QB is very fumble prone so be warned. I got in the habit of diving (X button) when defenders approached me.

3) Kicking - With the sliders maxed out, you will have enough leg to hit 70 yard FGs, assuming you line them up properly. This means you only need to get to mid field to score and that is important because gaining yards on offense is tough.

4) Punting - With the sliders maxed out, it will be difficult NOT to get touchbacks when you punt the ball. I would even punt on non-4th down just so i could pin my opponent deep and go back on defense.

5) 2 minute warning - The CPU will try to do clock management and/or hurry up offense during the 2 minute warning. This will be annoying as it will extends the game. My best advice is to have the ball during the 2 minute warning. Easier said than done.

Coins per Game:

With this game setup, you should have able to get >1000 coins per game. The actual number of coins varies (I don't know how) but below I listed the ranges I observed

1) All-madden difficulty (350 to 400): This is for winning the game
2) Beating CPU: (~250): This is for beating the CPU
3) winning by x points (375-450): Winning by a certain number of points. You get 375 for winning by 10. This is why i recommend only playing 5 minute quarters as there is minimal reason to run up the score.
4) Allowing between 0-100 yards rushing (100): Note that i said BETWEEN. If you do the offside cheat, their total offense will be negative and you will not get this. I recommend you do not do the offside cheat on every down. In fact, i usually only used the offside cheat on 4th down. My defense did a surprisingly good job. Also, this will limit how much meddling you will have to do.
5) 3 rushing TD (25), 3 receiving TD (25), 100 yards rushing (25): These rewards are paultry and are not enough to warrant playing long games. But if they happen, great.
6) Defensive TD (25): This is luck based. You can improve your chances by creating fumbles using the offside cheat but the 100 coins for limiting their offense to 0-100 yards is more appealing.
7) Supersim penalty (-300): Pretty stiff penalty for supersim. Be advised.

These are the only ones i saw. There are rewards for 2 rushing or receiveing TD but those only get you 5 points. There may be more (IE beating a player instead of the CPU)

Spending coins / Team Management

If there is one thing to take away from this guide it would be this: Make sure the contracts of your bought players do not expire. i made the mistake of playing my new players and then i had to spend a lot of effort acquiring contracts to get them on the field. They didn't help me win games because i was able to win with the starting team and the setup modifications. If you need to buy contracts, they are available
for 600 coins and they will get a player back on the field.

The reason i suggest 24 games is because all your starting players are on 25 game contract and if you play 25 games, the contracts will expire and you will have holes in your lineup. It isn't a big deal as you should have some contracts to throw around but it is a headache.

You will then have to decide how to spend your money. When you buy a package, you will usually get 6 players. The other cards will be coaches, stadiums, contracts, jerseys and playbooks.In order words, they are useless for team rating.

After 24 games, you should have ~24K coins. You will have to decide if you want to buy gold packs and get more players or buy premium packs and get better players. Honestly, i think it will be a wash. i ended up needing 1 premiums, 3 gold, 1 silver (bad purchase), 2 bronze (ran out of offensive lineman) and 5 contracts. I was stuck at 79 and bought a silver but that didn't get me over the hump. I then bought a gold and got up to 80.

Good Luck!

EDIT* This fantasy draft may no longer be working. Ill leave it for reference anyways, in case they reimplement it

Get 3000 tokens for signing up for a free nfl.com fantasy draft and syncing it to madden 12.

go to www.nfl.com/ea

Sign up for an account that is free. Confirm your email address and create a league.

Go into Madden online settings under XBOX LIVE menu and sync your account using the sign-up info.

For the rest of the coins follow CoolJoe's guide and also trade with friends.

BIG TIP - If you have yet to play Madden 12, you can play the demo and play one game of the demo. You will be rewarded with 3 gold cards that will instantly raise your team value. This will not work if you have played Madden 12 before using the demo.

Also if trading online keep in mind you can only trade a gold card for gold card and etc. Therefore you need to buy at least a pack or 2 of gold packs in order to get this using coins or msp. Granted trading with friends can still help. A friend of mine let me borrow some cards. I trade him a 85 linemen for Rodgers at 98 and it brought up my team 4 points alone. This can be done with all the "lower" positions on your depth chart.

Hope this helped on your way to the achievement :)

ps. "That was hard" That's what she said?

Alright here we go. Before you spend your hard earned money to get gold coins, don't. Put difficulty to all madden, quarters to five minutes, and change the sliders in your favor. You will get about 1200 gold coins at least a game. You could even play at three or four minute quarters, just don't play on one minute quarters because the penalty is too harsh at the end of the game. So if you do the math, you'll probably have enough to buy 2 gold premium packs by the end of your 20 games. It'll save you about six bucks if you put q little time in. I know I haven't yet achieved it but the game just came out.

Also, as noted from our helpful fellow gamers below, do NOT touch player sliders. It will reset and the game will no longer be on All Madden difficulty.

Do not waste your time playing tons of games! You only need to play 4 games total, including games 10 and 20 on the All Madden mode method so you unlock the achievements for 10 and 20 games, to finish this.

You also do NOT need an online pass, not even the 2-day 'trial' one. This can be done with a SILVER XBL account since you can play MUT against the CPU and can auction cards without even having a gold account.

Play games 1 and 2 (or just game 1 if you earn over 1000 coins doing so) using the All Madden method. Buy one bronze pack.

Put any stadiums, coaches, and playbooks you get on the Auction block. Minimum bid 1000 coins, maximum bid 1000 coins. Set it for 24hr duration. Check back every hour or so (go play something else) and some should have sold especially if it's during prime time evenings in the US.

Buy more bronze packs, auction everything off again. You can auction players too and sometimes they will sell, but coaches and stadiums tend to go the quickest for some reason. Eventually you can start buying silver and/or gold packs to auction off all the cards. The great thing about these is that the players will often sell just as fast or even quicker than the coachs/stadiums. Just remember to always set the starting bid and the buy it now to the lowest possible price so that people snap them up.

I have no idea why but there are still loads of people out there buying cards to complete collections. Gotta love football fans!

You should have 36,000 coins pretty quickly. It took me less than 2 days. Take those and buy NINE gold packs. This should give you enough players to put into your starting lineup to take your team above 80. Edit the gold players into your starting line after each pack and discard the bronze players so you don't run out of player card slots and wind up buying a gold pack you can't keep or something.

If for some reason it doesn't get above 80 with 9 gold packs, which it shouldnt (aka you get multiple kickers and only need 1), just auction off the gold players you don't need. These WILL go, and FAST.

This is SO much easier and faster than trying to play tons of MUT games with shitty servers that disconnect you, taking away any coins you earned when they do.

Once you have your 80-rated team, sim games 3-9, play game 10, sim games 11-19, and play game 20. With the gold players in your 80-rated team, you should have long enough contracts to get through game 20 without having to juggle your depth chart too much. Simming at the start with all bronze players leads to loads of contracts expiring and a headache managing the depth chart. I did it that way, and it's doable, but it would be easier with all those shiny gold and silver players. Just do the auctioning and get your 80 team first, then sim the crap outta all the games but game 10 and 20. Good luck!

Note: This solution will become less effective over time. Eventually people will stop looking at things on the auction block and buying them, unless EA somehow has 'bots' that buy stuff which I can't confirm. Even if they do, you know how EA is with their 'servers'!

This is a supplement to the other solutions.

By turning off the play clock, you also considerably reduce the amount of actual playing you need to do to get 900 coins on all-madden difficulty.

One rushing play takes care of the first quarter, a second gets you down to the 2 minute warning. If you take on another run you can occassionally burn the rest of the clock leaving a really long field goal. The opposition will disrupt this with timeouts sometimes so be aware of this. This means you only need one possession to pretty much consume the whole clock in each half.

Also putting the kicking stats up to 99 enables 100+ yd field goals!

A 3-0 win on all-madden against the CPU with 5 minute quarters is worth 900 points.

When I was playing it took me a total of 33000 coins to get the achievement. I bought a silver and two gold packs. The changes to your rating will not change until alter your team. Go to your depth chart and hit the "back" button to auto change your team. I had an 82 rating after I bought my second gold pack.