Madden 21 Chemistry Guide: Which to Choose

Madden Ultimate Team has added chemistries in its franchise within the last years, and each year, this section of the game improves and expands on its options. Chemistries boost certain attributes of players based on how strong and what the chemistry is. In this article, we will take a close look at the best offensive and defensive chemistries for your team in Madden 21!

First, it is important to understand why these chemistries matter so much for your team. Since it has the abilities to boost the skills of players on your team, it is simply a free bonus. There is no price to pay for these bonuses, so why not take them? Now, it is more beneficial to optimize the chemistry and boost it as high as possible for your team, since the stronger the chemistry, the stronger the attribute boost.

One of the first offensive chemistries that we think are great for your team is the “play fake” chemistry. As the name implies this is centered around players and teams who have specialized in play fakes, like play actions, throughout their career. What makes this offensive chemistry so great is the wide range of attributes it benefits. Having all of the tiers will get you 11 benefits with the majority of them being +4 to whatever skills they help with!

You can imagine that the play fake team chemistry would benefit the passing attributes and you would be completely correct in this assumption. It helps with +4 pass block power (PBP) to help your lineman. It also includes +4 catch (CTH) which helps your wide receivers catch even more passes. Another huge benefit that this chemistry has and why we’re discussing it further is because it still gives the quarterback +4 throwing power (THP). Of course the more power your quarterback, has the farther you can throw the ball, which gives you the ability to hit a deep pass on your play fakes. This is only a handful of the 11 attributes that this offensive chemistry gives you, so you can imagine how beneficial the chemistry is as a whole!

If you are picking a chemistry based on a single attribute bonus then we suggest one with a bonus to throwing power for the quarterback. This is easily one of the most important attribute boosts you can have, especially since this game rewards the long throws. Even if your quarterback has 99 throwing power, which is rare, you can still use this bonus to add to their stats. So, no matter what, since the game greatly benefits the long passes, make sure that your offensive chemistry gives some sort of boost to the throwing power attribute of your quarterback.

Now when it comes to the best defensive chemistry, we have chosen “balanced.” This is kind of a hot take and took us a while to choose, because one of the most popular opinions is using “lockdown.” We debated this heavily and at the end of the day decided that either one is a solid option, but we will stick with the balanced chemistry. Just hear us out on this one and keep on reading!

One reason for this decision was because the balanced defensive chemistry gives you the widest range of attribute bonuses to your team. Admittedly, it trades quality for quantity. By this we mean the value of each benefitting boost is less, but it has the widest overall range of attributes compared to the other chemistries. There are a total of 14 different attributes that this chemistry improves with two having a bonus of +3 while the others receive +2. As you can see, total absolute value is lower than the offensive bonuses, but a greater number of attributes benefit, giving it a boon of a tradeoff! We were willing to make the trade here so the defense was better overall, because we felt these attributes benefitted everyone. Other defensive chemistries were much more specific to different sections of the defense, which, while boosting your team’s defense in one section, leaves them particularly vulnerable in others.

Taking a look at the attributes now will help you understand what we mean whenever we say it better benefits the team as a whole rather than individual sections of the team. For example, the tackle attribute (TAK) of +3 one of the highest in this chemistry. Of course, everyone on defense is going to have a tackle attribute because anyone on defense can tackle the opposition at any given time. There is also the +2 stamina attribute (STA) which makes your players lose less energy over time. This also helps them maintain any speed boosts that they may have, and maintains their attributes at a higher level of performance over a longer period of time.

It still includes specialized benefits like +2 zone coverage (ZCV) and +2 pass rush (PRS), but as you can see, they are specialized benefits for everyone on the defense. This makes “balanced” the best defensive chemistry you will find in Madden 21.

We determined that the best offensive chemistry was the “play fake”, while for defense, the best chemistry you will find is the “balanced”. Chemistry is important because it gives your team free attribute bonuses to make everyone on your team just that little bit better, and every little bit goes a long way in Madden 21!