NHL 17 HUT Auction House Guide and Tips

No matter how late in the year it is, or how many coins you have to play with, it’s always possible to play the Auction House and make a profit.

Playing the Auction House is an important part of playing HUT because up until the introduction of Competitive Seasons, it was the only chance that you had to create a very strong team without spending any real money in-game. Many people often stray away from playing the Auction House as just the idea of it scares them away. I’m here to tell you that anyone can do it! If you make smart decisions, you are bound to make money unless EA comes into play by releasing new content at an unfortunate time.

The philosophy is “buy low, sell high”. It sounds simple; and the truth is, it is. To play the market you should find cards that are being sold for extremely low prices – prices that are considered “steals”. Then turnaround and sell them for more. Much like any economy, there is a supply and demand concept that plays into the value of these cards. The good news is, many people like to just sell off their cards without paying attention to what the going rates are.

There are many different factors that determine what price you should buy and sell these cards for and they include:

*Disclaimer: This post assumes you know the basic functionality of the NHL 17 Auction House. If you are completely brand new to HUT then you may want to start with our HUT Auction House Overview.

Seller’s Tax

To keep the in-game economy healthy, EA charges 5% tax on any cards you sell. This means that a card you sell for 20k, 1k will be taken out of the game and you will receive 19k. This is important because you want to be making a profit when you flip a card. You can’t buy a card for 95k and sell it for 100k because you would end up with the same amount of coins you started with.

Supply

You have to know a little background on the card which is usually related to how many cards are on the auction house at a time. Often, EA will release a special edition pack while limited edition cards are available – the lowest OVR cards tend to get flooded on the auction house. People will be trying to get rid of the card at a much lower price than it would normally go for.

Current Selling Price

While looking at the supply, keep an eye on the current selling prices.

Usually you want to have the cheapest card on the auction house, as that will be what buyers will most often look for – it will lead to the sale of your card sooner. You need to look around and know what everyone else is selling that card for. It is especially important to know what the cheapest card is up for, and then figuring out if you could still attain a profit by “undercutting” them (offer at a lower price).

Sometimes it is best to wait a little bit before putting up a card or if you expect the cheapest card to sell then undercut the next highest person.

Demand

Certain cards are more desirable than others, even if the cards have a lower overall. This is primarily due to exceptional synergies being given to those cards that may round out a team. In other cases, it could be that the advanced stats of the card suggest that the card performs much better than what the face of the card suggests (see Justin Schultz who has stats 2 or 3 points higher than the face of the card).

Selling Speed

Having your money sooner rather than later is obviously better, which is why you should price your card based on how quickly you want to sell it. If you sell it significantly lower than the lowest price on the auction house, you will likely sell it very quickly.

Three methods

There are three different methods that people use to “snipe” cards in the auction house. It is important to know the prices of cards before doing the first two methods (writing down the prices of certain cards in your price range will help immensely!).

The three methods are: Expiring Auctions, 59th Minute, and All Cards – we’ll cover each in detail below.

Expiring Auctions Method

The rookie method, but still viable, focuses on all the cards that are set to expire within the next few minutes or even next few seconds. There are many cards that have a very low starting price, and this method preys on those cards.

You would usually check cards within the first few pages as they are the cards that will expire soonest. Often times, a good deal could just be sitting there since the auction started 1+ hour ago. This will also lead to “bid wars” and you may have to duke it out with someone to win a card. At the same time, you could also waste time by spending forever outbidding someone by 50, only to lose the auction half an hour later.

59th Minute Method

The shortest amount of time that you can put up a card on the Auction House is 1 hour, thus this method focuses on that popular auction time. The way it works is, after deciding the minimum/maximum coin filter, you quickly flip through the pages of the Auction House until you get to the cards that have 1 hour left on their auctions.

This is where you will set up camp, and any new cards that get posted will show up as “59 minutes 59 seconds” as seen in the screenshot above. It is important to know which cards are the new cards, and which ones have been up for longer than an hour. The 59-minute method leads to the most “snipes”, as this is the place where most errors occur and people often omit a digit when posting cards or simply want to get rid of the card as quickly as possible so sell it really cheap.

This method takes a lot of patience as in some cases you may spend an hour and not get anything, while in others you could profit an easy 50k+ within just a few minutes. Unless it’s one of those obvious errors, you’ll also need to be familiar with prices before trying this.

All Cards Method

A method that only recently gained traction, the idea is that you are looking for deals at every time interval (1 hr, 3 hrs, 6 hrs, 12 hrs, 1 day, and 3 days). When you are looking at non-base cards, usually you’ll be able to go through all the cards in a particular filter (such as Halloween cards, or all the Expansion snipers) rather quickly. This method allows you to compare the cards that you are looking at easily, since the same card could be just a page away. It doesn’t require you to learn the prices of cards, as you’ll learn as you go along. This is made easier by segmenting prices, such as looking for cards between 10k and 20k.

In most cases, you want to make sure that there is a maximum price filter on the cards you are looking for, which is set to the amount of coins that you have (or are willing to spend).

How to Get Started

It largely depends on how many coins you have (or are willing to invest).

If you have less than 5k, you should be focusing on expansion and S2 cards. Early in the year, the gold rare cards were selling for 1k or more, many people posted them up for 600 or less. An easy 400+ profit could be made off a transaction like this. Late in the year it may be difficult to play the market like that; instead it will likely be better to focus on the more popular cards that go for 1k+ but are still sold for less than that.

If you have more than 5k, you can do a similar strategy as the one mentioned above but with more expensive cards, or you can move onto special edition cards such as TOTW/POTG/MS cards which quick sell for 5k but can usually go for 10k depending on the different factors mentioned earlier.

There are many instances of people putting up a special edition card worth 20k for 10k where you can double your profit with one transaction. Now if you started with 10k and sold a card for 20k, you could now buy two cards for about the same price! This cycle just continues until you can focus on some more expensive cards.

Additional Tips and Final Notes

By pressing up on the D-pad over a player card(looking at the player’s synergies) while browsing Auction House listings, you can give yourself a cheat sheet on what cards you have already seen and have no intention of seeing again.