How Madden 18 Turns Their GOATs Into Goats

With the release of new holiday GOATs and solo challenges this month, Madden 18 is providing people with the opportunity to add some of the greatest players in NFL history to their squad. But at what price? In the wake of EA coming under fire for their excessive reliance on microtransactions in Star Wars Battlefield II, it’s worth pointing out exactly how the release of these new GOATs uses a similarly frustrating system to ensure that anyone who wants to get their hands on a GOAT has either paid an exorbitant amount of money or sacrificed a huge chunk of their lives in the process.

First off: I’m a Giants fan. (please, no jokes about this horrendous 2017 season Editors Note: Please no jokes about the Chiefs either.)

This naturally means I would love to be able to add that newly released Michael Strahan GOAT to my defense. A quick look at the GOAT set requirements reveals that obtaining Strahan requires 40 Baby GOATs. These can be accomplished in a few different ways, so we’ll look at the different paths that can be taken to achieve this goal.

Paying for GOATs

Let’s say you have deep pockets and you just want to buy yourself that Strahan card and be done with it already. Madden’s got you covered, offering a limited-time bundle that will give you 34-plus Baby GOATs, all for the low price of just 5,850 points (or approx. $50 USD). That might not get you all the way to those 40 GOATs, but we’ll throw in a couple of gold Baby GOAT packs that contain 1-3 Baby GOATs at a cost of 450 points per pack (approx. $7.50 USD) and that should get the job done.

Total cost: approx. $57.50 USD

Solo Challenges

Fortunately, there are 22 newly added challenges to help start you on your way, meaning that you can get more than halfway to the goal without spending so much as a dime of real money, or even a single coin from your stash. That said, the challenges are not exactly the easiest to complete as they all demand playing a full game (with 3-minute quarters). The first 11 are on arcade mode and pro difficulty, while the last 11 are instead on competitive mode. They aren’t exactly challenging from a difficulty standpoint, but even if you complete them all on your first try and chew the clock as much as possible, they’re still bound to run you about 15 minutes each.

Total Time: 5.5 hrs

The Remainder

With those out of the way, now how to get those remaining 18 Baby GOATs without shelling out any actual cash? Maybe you could get the most value out of that GOAT bundle or even those gold GOAT packs seem like a bit of a deal, right? Well, forget about those because neither can be purchased with coins, only points. Instead, if you want to buy GOAT packs with coins, your only option is to buy a silver GOAT pack which contains 1 (and only 1) Baby GOAT for the cost of 8000 coins. This means, of course, you will have to buy 18 of those packs.

Total Cost: 144,000 coins 

Avg coins per game: 900

# of games to 144,000 coins: 160 games

Avg length of game: 30 minutes

Total Time Cost: 80 hours