Special Training Guide
Want to learn more about Special Training? Need a quick reference for how much material you'll need to complete the next Special Training level? This guide is for you!
Table of Contents
What is Special Training?
Special Training is a stat boost that can be applied to fully-trained Diamond-grade cards. Adding up to 5.2 OVR (26 points) of stat boosts to your card, Special Training provides a ton of extra oomph to Diamond cards and can dramatically increase your Team OVR.
To begin Special Training, your card must be Diamond and fully-trained (20/20). You will need to dump cards or Special Training Tickets into your card to complete each level. Higher grade cards/tickets provide more progress (as shown in the cost table below). Cards used as Special Training material are consumed in the process, meaning you will not get them back. Be careful not to mulch a card you might need in the future!
Note: If you reset the train on your card, its Special Training will be disabled until you train back up to 20/20.
What do I get for each level?
There are currently 10 levels of Special Training. The first 8 levels can be achieved by Diamond cards while the final two are reserved for Black Diamond cards. Levels 1-5 and 7-9 provide stat boosts to your top-trained stats. Levels 6 and 10 provide boosts to your skills.
Stat boost levels / Point distribution
Levels 1-5 and 7-9 provide stat boosts to your top-Trained stats. Look at your card's Train. The 3 stats with the most points will receive Special Training stat boosts. Ties are broken by the base stats. If two or more stats are tied in both Train and base stats, the left-most stat will get Special Training first. Click here to see examples of ST distribution (stays on page).
Here's the breakdown of the stat boost distributions:
| Lvl 1 | Lvl 2 | Lvl 3 | Lvl 4 | Lvl 5 | Lvl 6 | Lvl 7 | Lvl 8 | Lvl 9 | Lvl 10 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 Trained Stat | +2 | +2 | +2 | +2 | +2 | +2 | ||||
| #2 Trained Stat | +2 | +2 | +2 | +2 | +2 | |||||
| #3 Trained Stat | +2 | +2 | ||||||||
| Total boost | +0.4 OVR | +0.8 OVR | +1.2 OVR | +1.6 OVR | +2.0 OVR | +2.8 OVR | +4.0 OVR | +5.2 OVR |
Skill boost levels
Level 6: Diamond skills
When you achieve Level 6 Special Training, all Lvl 6 Gold skills will be increased to Lvl 7 Diamond skills. For most Gold skills, this provides a significant upgrade in performance.
Level 6 Special Training is a big part of why skill sets that start with all skills at Lvl 1 are less desirable and skill sets that start with all skills at Lvl 3 are very desirable. 1-1-1 sets will only be able to turn one skill Diamond, while 3-3-3 sets will be able to turn all three Diamond. As long as one of the skills starts at Lvl 2, you will be able to achieve two Diamond skills at Level 6 Special Training.
Level 10: One skill to Lvl 8
When you achieve Level 10 Special Training, you will be able to upgrade one Diamond skill from Lvl 7 to Lvl 8. As mentioned above, only Black Diamond cards can achieve Level 10 Special Training.
Multiple skill sets
If you have unlocked your second skill set, the benefits above will apply to both skill sets. Level 6 will turn all skills Diamond (assuming you've completed the skill leveling process). Level 10 will allow you to upgrade one skill in each set.
Special Training strategies
Special Training is very resource-intensive. Unless you have a stockpile of Diamond cards to use as material, you'll likely end up using thousands of lower-grade cards to complete just one card in your lineup. Because of this, you'll want to be smart about how you approach Special Training your team.
Getting started
Who to Special Train?
The first thing you should do is identify cards that you will have on your team for a long time. You don't want to waste resources Special Training a card that you'll cut in the near-future.
I recommend starting with a strong SP. Starting pitching is essential in this game and having an ace will benefit you in all game modes, particularly Friend battles and Club Challenge.
After your first SP, move on to your best home-run hitter. Presumably, you'll have this card trained such that the hitting stats are the top 3, which means the extra boost from Special Training will give you that extra pop in Arcade.
After that, it's up to you. Some people like to complete their whole rotation. Some ST one pitcher then one batter. Personally, I did the latter such that my pitching and batting OVRs stayed similar. This made my Ranked/Club performance more consistent, since my batters and pitchers were balanced and roughly at the same level.
Get to Level 6 (Diamond skills)
Once you've identified a card to Special Train, you should get it all the way up to Level 6 (Diamond skills). Diamond skills provide a significant upgrade over their lower-level Gold counterparts. I also found that watching the skills turn blue was very satisfying and motivating for me.
Once you get a card up to Level 6 (Diamond skills), move on to the next card. The additional +2 OVR you get from Levels 7 and 8 are not as valuable as getting Diamond skills on another card. Also, it costs nearly the same to complete Levels 1-5 as it does to complete Levels 7 and 8.
The game allows you to Special Train as many cards at a time as you like, but I suggest working on one at a time. Every day you spend with partial progress on a level is a day where you've spent resources for no return. You want to finish each level as soon as possible can to reap the benefits as soon as possible.
Once you've gotten everyone to Level 6, repeat the process for Levels 7 and 8.
How do I get materials?
It takes a ton of resources to Special Train an entire team. Your best bet is to aggressively farm League mode. You'll earn packs from League, and you can dump any non-useful card from those packs into Special Training. If you're in Master League, you can also acquire Special Training tickets from game boxes. Com2Us will occasionally give out Special Training tickets in events as well.
How fast you can complete Special Training is directly tied to how much you play and how much you dedicate your resources to it. When I was trying to complete my entire team I personally stopped doing all combos and tossed literally every card I got into ST. I missed the enjoyment of combos at first, but eventually I came to appreciate the guaranteed outcome of Special Training more.
If you're in regular League mode, you can use multiple devices to farm League games. This will increase your pack income, which will increase your ST speed.
If you're in Master League mode, it will be slow. Master League yields higher quality at the cost of quantity. For those debating whether to make the jump to Master League, consider whether it would be better for your team to stay in regular League a little longer to progress through Special Training faster.
How much does Special Training cost?
Special Training is very resource-intensive. The table below will tell you exactly how expensive each level is so you can plan your investments.
The number of cards you would need, per grade, to complete each level.
| Lvl 1 | Lvl 2 | Lvl 3 | Lvl 4 | Lvl 5 | Lvl 6 | Lvl 7 | Lvl 8 | Lvl 9 | Lvl 10 | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Normal N | 324 | 972 | 1,620 | 1,944 | 2,592 | 2,916 | 3,564 | 4,212 | 4,860 | 5,508 | 28,512 |
| Bronze B | 81 | 243 | 405 | 486 | 648 | 729 | 891 | 1,053 | 1,215 | 1,377 | 7,128 |
| Silver S | 20 | 61 | 101 | 121 | 162 | 182 | 223 | 263 | 304 | 344 | 1,781 |
| Gold G | 4 | 14 | 22 | 27 | 36 | 40 | 49 | 58 | 68 | 76 | 394 |
| Diamond D | 1 | 3 | 5 | 6 | 8 | 9 | 11 | 13 | 15 | 17 | 88 |
About the Cost Table
Where did these numbers come from?
The data for this table stems from an underlying pattern spotted by Redditor jhfchow. Check out their original post here as well as their description here. The following write up combines some of the work jhfchow presented (used with permission) with my own knowledge about the in-game logic.
Quick Overview
Basically, each Special Training level requires a certain number of cards to complete it. You can use a card of any grade to contribute to your progress. Higher grades contribute more progress. This structure is described in more detail below. This underlying structure gives us the percentage value of a single card of each grade for each Special Training level. With that, we can then figure out how many cards and points are needed.
Each of these estimates has been vetted with cards in-game (see below). They are accurate.
Please note: I had previously estimated the values in the table through trial and error. While those numbers were quite close to the numbers you see now (within my margin of error when I originally estimated them), the numbers in the table above are much more precise.
The underlying structure
The easiest way to think about the underlying structure is by understanding the relationship between contributions from different grades.
Diamonds are worth the most. You can measure the cost to complete a level in Diamonds, as each level can be completed perfectly with some number of Diamond cards. One Diamond contributes 100% to Level 1, seventeen Diamonds contribute 100% to Level 10. If you save up eighty-eight Diamonds, you can complete your card's Special Training all at once!
Each grade below Diamond is worth a sub-division of the grade above it. The subdivisions look like this:
- 1 Diamond is worth 4.5 Golds
- 1 Gold is worth 4.5 Silvers
- 1 Silver is worth 4 Bronzes
- 1 Bronze is worth 4 Normals
Given those subdivisions, all we need to know is how many Diamonds it takes to complete each level and we can calculate the numbers for the rest of the grades!
How did you vet these numbers?
The game doesn't give us much help in determining progress. All we can see is the percent for each card we're dumping in, but we only get one decimal point of precision. But, by Special Training up to each level with Diamonds, we can ensure we start that level at a true 0.0% contribution progress. This means that I was able to determine, with precision, exactly how much a card of each grade was contributing.
The process
I loaded up various combinations of cards of different grades and logged how much progress (in %) the game told me I would receive for that combination. I did this over 150 times for each level, making sure I had a broad set of combinations.
Next, I reverse-engineered the game's process for displaying the progress. It doesn't round the number, but instead uses the floor of the tenths value. "Flooring" is like rounding, but the number always goes down. Put simply: 0.10% and 0.19% both appear as "0.1%" in the game.
With that figured out, I simply had to play with the value % until every one of the combinations I had logged earlier generated the same progress % as I saw in game.
Because of the way the progress is displayed in game, my margin of error in this process is 0.002%. That said, for each level I tried, I was spot on to the values that were predicted by the subdivision structure. That is why I am confident that the numbers in the table above are accurate.