Multiply 365 Day 40 - Underachievements

      I give up.  And I have no one to blame for my failure but me.  See,. I have been playing Madden on Facebook, a football app where you collect cards to improve your team, thereby making the team better.  As is the case with the app, sometimes they will offer bonus achievements to shoot for and which you will be rewarded.  One such achievement is taking place even as I write this entry.  The trick is to collect enough Green Bay Packer cards so that every person in your starting lineup is a Green Bay Packer, in honor of the Packers winning the Super Bowl.  The prize for doing so is 1 million coins, good enough to accomplish a lot of things, whether that be finishing off a stadium, buying gamebreakers, adding to your card collection, whatever, but 1 million coins is plenty of spending cash for the game.  But stupid me didn't pay attention to the rules, I though that it had to be accomplished by the 7th,k the day after the Super Bowl, so I was spending my time this past weekend buy lots of crappy card packs, cards that had no chance of helping my team, but that if I was lucky enough in the draw, might contain some Packers to get me closer to the achievement.  The only problem with that logic is the achievement wasn't Monday, it was Wednesday, so all of the coins I blew this weekend on shitty cards could have been spend solely on Green Bay Packer card sets.  While I may only have been able to buy one or two of those, each one costs 175,000 coins, I only needed 4 cards to field a lineup and the odds would have been better if I was only buying Packers (though I would have run the risk of buying duplicate cards) as opposed to buying cards from the entire league instead.

     Of course I realized my error Monday when no such achievement was available, but by then it was too late.  Sure I still had a snowball's chance of getting it, I had two free cards coming to me from Pro League 3, plus I could save up my coins in hopes of getting lucky and getting one of the Packer Player of the Week cards that were issued Monday, but those were only available in Platinum (90,000 coins) and Ultimate (150,000 coins) packs, which would take a while for me to collect.  I figured I might as well go for the larger of the two because even if I didn't get the Packers I needed, I might be able to hit a couple of minor achievements, one for getting a team rank of 100 or more (I am at 99) or one for collecting 25 New York Giants cards (I have 24).  After nearly two days of working to collect enough coins for the Ultimate pack, I finally hit my goal this afternoon.  The result was an abject failure.  Of the 5 cards I got out of the Ultimate pack, only one was an actual Ultimate card, the other 4 were all Platinum.  Since everyone in my starting lineup is at least of Ultimate rank (90 or higher), that made the four Platinum cards all but useless (to add to my aggravation none of the cards were Packers).  The one Ultimate card was useful, a 99 Jared Allen, but his slight bump over a 95 Robert Mathis I had been playing wasn't enough to get the team rating to 100.  The only real plus out of the pack of cards was that I got a bonus head coach card, the Mike Tomlin card which grants double coins on all wins for as long as he is head coach (4 days unless renewed).  That will make getting the more valuable packs easier, but now there just isn't enough time.  The bonus achievement ends in about 3 hours and even if I play all of my scrimmages between now and then there just isn't enough time for me to get what I need.  So instead I figure I would complain about my stupidity on the blog page.  Seems I am not as smart as I think I am some days. But then this is just one of those days where a pen I had behind my ear managed to explode sending ink through my hair, so we just chalk the whole thing up to suck and move on.