Learn the best ways to utilize Madden Ultimate Team in Madden NFL 24. In this video, you’ll learn how to effectively create your lineup, use X-Factors and abilities as well as how to use team chemistries.

Video transcript: 

Today's video is sponsored to you by EA. We're going to talk about lineup, construction, abilities, X-Factor, and Team Chemistries.

Yo, what's going on? Everybody out there? This is Popular Stranger and we are back at you again today with another Madden 24 Ultimate Team video. In today's video we're going to be going over how you build your team through XFactor and abilities and setting your lineups. Now, if you guys enjoy this video, if you like it, if it helps you out, make sure you go ahead and click that thumbs up button shows a lot of support on the channel, helps the videos get noticed. Also, if you're brand new here, you're searching on YouTube from up 24 content, whether it's how to make coins, how to Get Free Players, how to Build Your Ultimate Team, you found the right channel for everything, stay a while, click that subscribe button, turn that notification bell on as well. So you guys are alerted when we drop additional videos.

Let's get right on into it. If you're new to Madden Ultimate team, looking at the lineup screen and understanding X factors and abilities and team chemistries can be a bit overwhelming. So we're going to cover it all in this video. If you're not new to MUT, you probably know a lot of this stuff, but let's start on the offensive screen of our lineup here and we'll talk about X-factor and ability. So we're going to use this headliners, Kenny Pickett as an example. And the headliners promo in general is a really good example because you might see these symbols on items and wonder what they are. Those are abilities and would this promo specifically these abilities are baked onto the item, meaning that you don't have to spend any training, you don't have to do anything special to unlock them. They are there and able for you to be used.

We'll show you how to activate them in a moment, but when you're on the lineup screen, if you're on PlayStation, you can hit square. If you're on Xbox, you can hit X and it's going to pull up this option screen. You can also do this within your item binder. Me personally, I like to do it from the lineup screen. We're going to go ahead and choose upgrade. Now, when we take a look at this item, the first step in this path is that you do have to spend five training to unlock everything. And we've done that already. So you can see if you go down to this second tier of the superstar and X factor and ability section doesn't have any lock icons on it. So we can basically pick and choose what we want to activate or what we want to add on here.

And the currency that you're going to need to do these things will be training. You can always quick sell items to get training. There's a training re-roll within the store that you can spend training to see if maybe you get a little bit more. I wouldn't risk that. And generally you need training to do what we're trying to do here.

X-factors

So this big slot, the first slot, the big square is going to be your X-factor square and you can reach read each description, right? So gambit is going to give you faster passes that can't be picked off by AI defender. So that's a non-user defender. We have dots which is going to grant perfect passing on any throw. Omaha is a really good one. It shows defensive coverage on defensive backs. All of these things sound very powerful, right? Well here's the kicker with X factors.

These only activate after certain criteria is meant in game. Another caveat of this is that you can only have three x factors on offense and three on defense. Now everybody builds their team a little bit differently, so it's up to you on which players you want to activate. But for the most part, a quarterback is pretty much always activated. And for me personally, Omaha is one of my favorite X-factor because if you kind of get in a zone with your player and that's essentially what it is, you're in the zone with your player, you're playing really good with them. Once this is activated, you can almost see what your opponent is running on defense and it makes it even easier to pass. So you can explore with these different X factors. But the bottom line here is that you can only activate one and to activate it end game, the criteria is different for each X factor, but you basically have to do good within the game to get this to activate.

There are special house rules, game modes, and some items will actually have these activated by default maybe later on down in the year. We don't know that for sure, but for now, if you put one of these or assign one of these onto a item like we're going to do with Kenny Pickett today and activate it within the game, this one specifically being Omaha, we will be able to see the coverage that our opponents defensive backs are on.

Abilities

Now these smaller squares on this screen are abilities and you can see there's an ability slot number one and ability slot number two. And a lot of times there are multiple ability slots on items such as elite cards. So if we take a look at this Kenny Pickett, he comes by default with this protected and that's for him being part of the headliners promo. But you can actually switch this and changes so he can get quick draw, he can get lofting dead eye and if you look right under the picture here, it gives you a description of exactly what it does.

So for quick draw, you're going to get faster throwing animations one under pressure directly below the name of this ability. Quick draw, you see 200, that's 200 training that it would cost me right now to unlock this. And then it would cost two ability points to activate it. And you're allowed right now six ability points on offense and six on defense. Those numbers could change. The cost of some of these abilities could change as the year goes on and as cards get better. And you can also see there's some abilities on this Kenny picket that can't be achieved yet. If we wanted jukebox or if we wanted spin cycle, this player would have to get a 90 spin move, which is unlikely for Kenny Pickett being a quarterback. But these are some examples of abilities on an item and this is just a quarterback for example.

We'll go over to the defensive side and take a look at this liner's. Kamren Curl. We're going to go to the upgrade tab. Again, if you want to unlock and you can notice that the lock icon is here if you actually search for this item or any item within the catalog, you can see all of this information without having to spend five training. But we're going to go ahead and do that just to show you an example of how we activate or unlock these X factors. So again, these are all of the X factors that cam curl can get. One of my favorite ones on defense, especially for defensive backs is universal coverage. It gives you improved coverage and catch knockouts and man and zone coverage. So don't cost any ability points, whereas abilities do cost ability points, but X factors you need to meet certain criteria for them to activate, whereas abilities are essentially always activated.

But obviously for something like quick draw earlier with Kenny Pickett, he has to be under pressure and throwing the ball. It's just not always going to be there. So we'll go ahead and put universal coverage on this cam curl card, our item, and then we can take a look at his abilities. He comes with this deflator pre-baked on there, but if we wanted to change that out for checkout or outmatched or Stonewall, we have that option. And again, this specific ability would cost 200 training and would be one ability point to activate out of the six that are allotted to you on offense. And then on defense. Now after you unlock abilities and X factors on each individual item or any given item like we did on Kam Curl and Kenny Pickett, you still have to activate them on your lineup screen. So when you're on the defensive side of the ball or the offense, if you use your directional pad and go all the way to the right, you're going to see this active superstar section.

If we go into that, you can see right now it says that we have three out of our six ability points in use. If we go into that, we're going to see we have this Odell Beckham Jr. And then we also have this Kenny Pickett player. So if you wanted to deselect this, you just press X or A on Xbox and that would take it away. And now if you look towards your upper right, the X-factor limit is zero out of three, the AP limit is one out of six. If we wanted to reactivate that, which would be ideal, that's what we want to do. Just notice in the upper right those numbers have now changed and the same thing is going to take place on the defensive side and actually special teams kickers and punters can get abilities as well. But if we go over to the defense and go to Active Superstars, you're going to see cam curl is activated along with Reed Blankenship, which is an item that had one of those abilities automatically assigned to the item.

Anytime you add a new item to your lineup or a new ability or a new X-factor, make it a habit to go to this screen before you load into a game and make sure everybody is activated. If you change a wide receiver from wide receiver number one to number three or the slot receiver, make sure you go back in and make sure that they are activated because sometimes they will deactivate.

Team Chemistry

Another way to make your players better is Team Chemistries and you'll probably hear a lot of talk about theme teams. This is a way to make your players faster and generally better. So within this same lineup screen, under the active superstar section, if you use your DPA and go down, you're going to see all of these various chemistries and there's ones for team captains, there's one for your season one motivator players that you receive from the season one field pass.

We also have these team chemistries, right? So we'll use the Philadelphia Eagles for an example. If I press on PlayStation or a on Xbox, we're going to get a dropdown that shows right now on our team we have five eagles that are activated or five eagles on our roster. And because we have five of them, we're going to get plus one strength to all of the eagles on our team. And the more that you have of the same team, the more boosts that you get. So tier two, which would be 10 out of 50, is going to give you plus one to jumping and plus one to strength. And in a moment I'll show you how to activate chemistries, team chemistries on individual players. I would say most commonly the goal here for most players is to get a team chemistry to 25 or 50 because that's going to provide a speed boost.

And speed is something that a lot of people go after as far as their players. So when you get to 25 of one team component, that gives you plus one to speed. And if you're able to get all the way up to 50, that'll give you another plus one to speed. So plus two, and that is the goal of building a theme team is to get 50 of the same team chemistry all in one lineup. And that's a combination between offense and defense because you're going to take advantage of getting plus two to speed and a bunch of these other attributes that we see as we scroll up and down. Now, a lot of times by default, these player items will have the current team that they play for chemistry assigned to them. So Reed Blankenship already has the Eagles there. Kam Curl already has the Washington football team there, but we have situations where players have played for multiple teams.

And if I go back over to my offense and take a look at Odell Beckham here, we're going to again hit our square button here, which is going to give us some options that would be X on Xbox, we want to select upgrade with X on PlayStation A on Xbox, we get back to this upgrade screen where we saw our X factors and abilities. But if you take it one step further and go down to chemistries and positions, you can actually change team chemistries on certain items. So Odell Beckham has played for now four different teams. If you wanted to put New York Giants or LA Rams or Cleveland Browns on him instead of the Ravens, you could do that. So if you're running a brown Steam team, this might be an item that you're definitely going to be shooting for. You can see the boost that you get on this screen as well.

Remember the tier one, which is five components, gives you plus one to strength. If we scroll down with our right analog stick, if we get to 50 components, you can see the plus one speed and you also get that at 25 components as well. So the goal always is if you're going to build a theme team of your favorite team or whatever way and route you want to go is to get 50 out of 50 so you can get that speed boost. The good thing is with Team Chemistries, unlike the XFactor and abilities, you don't actually have to activate them. So I just want to show you, for example here, if we scroll down and take a look at the Ravens, we have two of five. If I go back to this Odell Beckham item and change it from, and we'll just go ahead and change it to the Browns.

You're going to see now that the Ravens will say one of five and we will now have one added onto the Browns. I don't know if off the top of my head if we have another brown activated within this lineup, but let's scroll down and yes, we can see Cleveland Browns now one of five and if we scroll a little bit further, the Ravens have dropped down to one of five as well. So that's all calculated for you as far as the X factors and abilities. You do have to activate those as we showed you in the beginning of the video. And that's kind of roster construction 1 0 1. If you got any questions down below in the comments section, feel free to leave it. And thank you guys for tuning into another video. My name is Popular Stranger and I'm out. Peace.