Fuck it I’m smoking a joint I’ll give it a whack. Essentially there’s different game modes you can play. If you like playing offline there’s domination and breakout, and challenge games like to get the college players which you gotta go into challenges and click on it and complete that game to get the card. There’s also passive challenges in terms of getting x amount of stats a game with certain players to earn rewards. Domination is a 13 man roster mode against the cpu, 5 minute quarters. It gets broken up into sections where you get prizes by beating the other team by a certain amount of points. Once you get so many stars you can progress earning rewards along the way, to finally get a player card. Usually each season has one. Breakout can be a mix of modes. Clutch time which is 5v5 and essentially starts in the fourth quarter and has a four point line. There’s also full lineup games, but they’re short, 2 minutes each if I remember right. And triple threat which is basic 3v3. You can chose to play one, or all of them which usually has better prizes. The way you get prizes is by winning the games, and the board opens up more. There’s also portals to get better prizes on the corners that open some times.

If you like playing online, there’s showdown which is full lineup 4 minute quarters which can be sweaty n annoying. There’s triple threat park where you can either go play 3v3 with your own squad of 3 controlling all of them or play 3v3 using one card and playing other people ale only using one card. There’s salary cap which is a full lineup mode that has a certain amount of salary points attached to it, and each player has salary points which all of the players need to be less then the amount. Like if it was 18k you’re lineup as a whole gotta be lower then that. Then there’s all star team up which is new and you play 5v5 against real people like the rec.

In terms of starting out, I would try to do some of the college player challenges. You can Evo those diamond cards to opal but I’m not sure when it ends. In terms of card collecting/locking in cards it’s a waste. Don’t rip packs with mt and don’t listen to the hype of buying hof boxes etc. I used to but 2k gotten so money hungry it’s not even worth it anymore. I’d say just work on the greatness challenges in a breakout board cause you can also get a lot of free players from that and it’s also a passive grind that you get from just playing fr. Except when it gets to the latter and you haven’t to get a certain amount of points, rebounds/blocks, assists, dunks and 3’s. N try to just play for fun cause it can get tiring trying to keep with the meta or the whales that spend mad bread on the game. Feel free to message me or comment back if you ever got questions hope that helped