Do Wilcard transfers affect prices??

 I don't know.

I don't believe anyone (not ordinary FPL managers struggling with the game, anyway) does know for sure. Although a lot of people have convinced themselves that they do know - on no obvious basis. The idea that transfers made under a Wildcard are excluded from affecting the price-change mechanism in the game seems to be no more than a pervasive myth.

FPL Towers declines to publish any rules on how the price-change mechanism works (because, presumably, they don't want people to get too good at 'gaming the system'). And none of the online guides I've looked at over the years, guides which claim to have deduced the main 'rules' from close observation of price changes over an extended period, has ever suggested that Wildcard transfers are excluded from the process. Moreover, FPL frequently makes tweaks to this mechanism, without announcing or explaining them; so, even if such a 'rule' might have been in place at some point in the past, even last season, it might not necessarily still be in effect now.  So, nobody can really know for sure; and anyone who claims they do is a victim of self-delusion (a sadly common ailment in the FPL community).

I would imagine that this notion arose because it is fairly obvious that transfers made while a Free Hit chip is in play are so excluded from affecting prices; and so it might seem reasonable to suppose that the similar Wildcard chip is subject to the same proviso.

But there is a very obvious difference with the Free Hit: those are not 'real transfers' - they're all going to be automatically revoked within a matter of days.

With the Wildcard, however, the expectation is that all changes may persist indefinitely. And even those which are rapidly reversed, are nevertheless reversed by a conscious decision of the manager playing the game - based on his appraisal of unfolding circumstances. Even if a transfer has only been 'in place' for 24 hours, it is still a 'real transfer'; there is no good reason for disregarding its possible impact on overall ownership levels and price-change cues just because it was made under a Wildcard.

The purported rationale for such a strange and pointless rule is that it is intended to dissuade people from trading for profit on their Wildcard (particularly over an extended gap between gameweeks, such as the current extra-long international break - as I discussed at some length this morning).

There are two problems with this explanation. 

First, individuals trading for profit, or even quite large groups of managers trading for profit, are not generally going to have any decisive impact on price-changes. You usually need huge numbers of managers making the same trade within a short space of time to trigger a change. There are only going to be very rare gameweeks where you do have a very substantial percentage of managers all using their Wildcards at once - such that this might become an issue.

Second, since a Wildcard can be played retroactively at any point before the next gameweek deadline, such a 'deterrent policy' can be easily circumvented by paying points for the transfers initially, and then wiping out that points-spend with a subsequent playing of the chip. [There is now in theory a cap of 20 transfers per gameweek - which is not applied to the Wildcard or Free Hit chips; but that really is a huge number of transfers to make, even in a very extended gameweek. When I have tried speculative trading, I don't think I've come anywhere close to making that number of transfers. So, the prospect of being able to use 'unlimited transfers' with the Wildcard isn't much of a factor in seeking to guard against this supposed 'abuse', I don't think.]

My own - yes, superficial, anecdotal - experience of trying out Wildcard trading over international breaks (when, presumably, very large numbers of managers - perhaps responsible for the majority of the transfer volume in these periods - are indeed on their Wildcards) is that Wildcard trades do appear to play into the price-mechanism. (There wouldn't be such large volumes of transfers every single day unless a lot of them were being produced by Wildcards. There may, of course, be a further question as to whether Wildcard transfers - and perhaps Free Hit transfers also - are publicly counted in the official transfer numbers, but kept apart from a second, secret number of 'real' transfers. But I don't think the denizens of FPL Towers are capable of that level of sophistication in their cruelty - or simply in their administration. I repeat that my impression has been that the large numbers of transfers we see over an extended gameweek like this must be largely due to Wildcards in play,... and they do seem to be affecting price changes.) But, like I said at the outset, I can't be sure; and there is really no way to tell.

However, it doesn't really make much difference. Whether or not you yourself are playing your Wildcard is utterly irrelevant to the price-change mechanism in the grand scheme of things. The only factor that would make a difference is if very large numbers of other people are also playing their Wildcards at the same time. And if that is the case,.... well, FPL Towers would be rotten kill-joys if they excluded those transfers from the price-changes. But... maybe they do, maybe they don't.  So what??  We seek to trade-for-profit based on the transfers we can see happening (and our own appreciation of which players are likely to become popular or unpopular). We don't know who those people making the trades are, we don't know if they're on a Wildcard or not; we just have to accept the transfer numbers that the game publishes, and act on those. We may resent that the actual number of transfers may be much higher and is not being fully counted, we may bridle at the thought that our own - and our fellow Wildcarders' - transfers are perhaps not contributing to the price shifts we hope to benefit from. But we have no way of knowing what's going on behind the scenes at FPL Towers; we have to accept the transfer picture and the likelihood of price changes that is presented to us.

The common idea that Wildcard transfers don't affect prices is not only - in all probability - an unfounded myth; it is, ultimately, utterly unimportant, it has no bearing at all on how we approach trading-for-profit on a Wildcard.