How and when to use wildcard chip in Fantasy Premier League? You should always use it as part of your strategy. Let’s look at our essential wildcard tips.
This article is a part of our series: What is Wildcard in FPL and how does it work?
1. Use the wildcard for tactical reasons, not for emotional reasons
This is my eighth FPL season, and the previous seven times I always activated wildcard during the first 12 gameweeks. But by doing that, I learned one very important lesson.
You may not agree with me, but I think, that wildcarding just because your team is not doing well is not a good FPL strategy.
I think that wildcard should be used only for tactical reasons – to set up a team for double gameweeks or to set up teams for fixture swings.
The reason behind my thinking is: if your team is not doing well at the beginning of the season, and you decide to use your wildcard – you likely do not change the expected output of your team.
You change the players, but you may end up changing one team with an expected output of 57 points per gameweek to another team with an expected output of 57 points per gameweek.
So, at the end of the day, even if you change the majority of your players when wildcarding, you just move to the right or left on the same indifference curve.
You will not jump on the new indifference curve with a higher output of 58,59 or 60 points. This happened to me when I wildcarded very early (before GW4) in my first two FPL seasons.
I wildcarded early, but I just changed one suboptimal team for another suboptimal team with the same output.
Further reading: When to use wildcard in FPL in 2023/24 season?
2. Never chase the past
The thing is that when we are wildcarding, we look mainly to the past and we are chasing points of previous gameweeks.
We think that now we have more information, that we know more about the season.
But the truth is that we don’t. FPL is unpredictable. Very unpredictable. And we will never be able to predict the outputs of gameweeks.
So, when you use your wildcard without tactical reason, it is like you would not wildcard at all. You will not change the expected output of your FPL team.
3 Pick a team that is going to score the most points
In my following two seasons, I used a wildcard a bit later (during fixture swings between GW7 – GW12), I was able to finish last in the top 1K (942nd in 2018/19 and 119th in 2019/20) overall ranking and to win my country – Slovakia – mini-league. And I learned a few things.
You should not take unnecessary risks when using your wildcard and you should always pick a team that you think is going to score the most points, regardless of your overall rank.
No matter how bad the season is for you, the only thing you can do about it is to pick a team that you think will score the most points.
That is the only way.
Jumping on risky and not proven differentials, or low-owned players hoping that it shoots you at the top of the ranking is never a good idea.
Because by doing so, you are just choosing suboptimal solutions.
Conclusion
The wildcard is the most powerful FPL chip. Always use it wisely with tactical reasons in mind.
Read more FPL strategies.
