I don't even worry about the rewards and am gonna stop with solo battles and all that grindy annoying BS. I get what I get and having the latest cards is a lot more inconsequential than the whales like to admit anyways. I even ran an experiment and picked up budget beasts like 81 Malik Willis, 83 Duvernay, 81 Tycen as my user, etc, basically just dropping my OVR, keeping speed, sacrificing accuracy, route running, coverage stats etc. I started a season on MVP difficulty doing this.
The first thing that happened was recovering a fumble on the opening kickoff, scoring asap, then picking off my opponent twice and scoring again each time with insane jumps by none other than 79 Keyshon Nixon and sick catches and RACs by 83 Duvernay. I also noticed how much faster 86 Foster (I did put in the freebies I would logically use) played, and 81 Malik Willis moved way faster than 88 Vick ever did. Accuracy wasn't an issue any more than any other QB. Only a couple of missed throws due to pressure.
Predictably, I started losing when the game started performing bad as usual, since it's obviously difficult to tackle, lurk, throw/catch when the game randomly decides to not even respond to your input or do so very poorly. Ultimately ended up 3-3 against God squads, largely because opponents would break off big plays I would normally stop, and prevent plays I normally would make due to severe input delay. I started off 3-0 very convincingly (21-0, 14-0, 21-7; last result was the opponent quitting early third quarter, by far the longest anyone in the first 3 games stayed) before the performance issues started. I have top of the line hardware but unfortunately this is on the PC version which might have been a mistake on my part. It's not optimized for PC at all.
So seriously, why? Why bother with any of this crap? The cards don't matter anywhere near as much as the whales like to think with their sunk cost fallacy. The game doesn't even run right half the time, randomly lags and performs terribly out of nowhere, and this largely is the determining factor of outcomes of my games more than anything else, or at least raises the what if questions. Of course sometimes I simply get outplayed and have no problem admitting that; there are some pretty awesome players out there and everyone runs into being overmatched sometimes. Whatever.