There actually is a way to play and enjoy the game without dropping any real money. Sure, you won’t get some of the most elite gear or characters this way, but even in-game specials are achievable for no real cash with a little effort. In [an earlier] PvP season on Facebook, for example, I wasn’t able to score in the top echelon and get first access to an upcoming character (Red Hulk), but I was able to win the PvP unique character, Juggernaut, just using resources won through play. – AppSaga

Gold

Unless you’re spending money on the game (and lots of it), gold (GP) is one of your scarcest and most precious resources. People spend it on everything from energy to command points to whatever neato keeno gear is being sold in the Store. Rule of thumb: don’t spend it. You will always want it for something, and you will never have enough.

Naturally, you’re going to accumulate gold, and you”re going to want to spend it. Or need to spend it. My suggestions for spending gold are as follows.

• Agent Uniform(s): the Reinforced Trench uniform costs 24 gp. You need at least one. More about uniforms in the Agent section.
• Save it for Special Ops – at lower levels, you will need to spend gold to skip tasks that you can’t do because you lack the heroes to complete them.
• Spend it in dribs and drabs for command points when you’re sick of farming to get those last two points to buy that hero, but don’t do this as a rule. You can always try to farm for command points (see below). Gold is rare and valuable.
• Very rarely, you will earn a weapon that is so good for your style of play that you will want to “reforge” it – bringing it up to your level so it will be more powerful. Generally, this is a wasteful use of gold, but there are exceptions. Hesitate before doing this, and hesitate again, but there are times when you just feel like you have to go for it.

Never spend gold on respins of any kind. Never spend it on energy or Shield Points. Never spend it on leveling heroes or speeding up research. Don’t buy weapons or gear with gold until you learn about how they perform from the Avengers League or Avengers Wiki communities. If you can wait for something to happen without spending gold, do it. Be very, very stingy with your gold.

Learn more about gold.

An excellent article on earning and spending gold.

Silver

Silver is a major currency in MAA. While you don’t want to spend gold unless you absolutely have to, you will spend silver like crazy. You’re going to need a near-endless stream of it. What do you need it for? What don’t you need it for? Leveling heroes. Buying ISO chips. Research. Items. You name it, it probably costs silver somewhere along the line.

Luckily, there are plenty of ways to collect silver.

• Flight Deck: This is the single best way to collect silver. Those cute little planes sitting on the deck of the helicarrier should be out on missions every day, piloted by your heroes. If you’re on your computer, whether you’re playing or not, your guys should be flying. The 20-minute flights earn the most silver for your time. If you’re going to be away from your computer for a while, longer missions are available, up to a 24-hour flight. However, the longer the flight, the less it earns per minute. In other words, you’ll earn much more silver from 3 20-minute missions than one 1-hour mission. When you go to bed, send your guys out on a 6- or 12-hour mission, depending on whatever your time frame is for getting back online. And the higher level the heroes are, the more silver they bring back. Learn more about the flight deck.
• From Allies: You get some silver from your allies during your daily visits to them. (Learn more about allies here.) You won’t get a lot, but it adds up.
• From Fighting Battles: You get a little bit of silver every time you win a battle during a mission.
• From Selling Unneeded Items: When you see you have 127 EMP grenades (the most useless item in the game in my opinion), you should go to the Store and click “Sell Items.” Sell those puppies. I never sell all of any item (almost never), and I don’t sell weapons unless I have more than one. If you have ten Monofilament Blades, for example, you’re perfectly safe in dumping nine of them. I tend to be something of a hoarder when it comes to gear, because once you sell a piece of equipment, you may never see another one again. But the kind of things you get during ally visits and deploys can be sold without fear. Just don’t sell things you need (for example, I never sell healing items like Vishanti Pages or First Aid Kits, even if I have 200 of the things). If you find yourself using an item regularly, don’t sell them.
• From Completing Missions and Tasks: You get some silver for one-starring and two-starring missions. You get silver for completing missions and tasks during Special Operations, Covert Operations, and the like. The more active you are, the more you’ll collect.
• From Fighting Group Bosses: Dude. I have won millions, no exaggeration, from fighting group bosses during Special Operations. You often get your tail kicked, especially if you’re a non-spending and/or a low-level player, but it’s worth the humiliation to bring home tons of silver. The more allies you have, the more group bosses you can fight. These are serious money-makers. Fight ’em when you have the opportunity.
• “Earning” Silver via Facebook Sponsors: You can also “earn” it by taking surveys, signing up for insurance policies, and other ways similar to those offered for gold. My advice is the same: be wary and don’t trust those sites with your personal information.
• Buying Silver: You can do it, but unless there are very specific circumstances warranting this, it strikes me as a very special kind of stupid to buy silver with your credit card. Or you’re rich enough where spending money profligately isn’t a problem for you, in which case don’t let me dissuade you!

Learn more about silver.

Command Points

Command points (CP) buy two things in MAA: heroes and enhanced ISO chips (more about these issues in the Agents and Heroes and the More Information pages). Command points are rare and precious, and non-wealthy players fight like tigers to get them. You can get command points a number of ways:

• Farming: The best way to get CP. Find out more below.
• Reward Roulettes: You can get CP by winning them in the roulettes after a Boss fight, an Epic Boss fight, or a Heroic Battle.
• Daily Rewards: CP are (almost) always available in the Daily Rewards roulette.
• 5-Starring Missions: If you achieve five stars in a Chapter 1 mission or a Special Ops mission, you get 5 CP.
• Various Special Operations and Covert Operations tasks: Completing some tasks during these missions earns you CP.
• Lockbox Rewards: During some Special Operations, Covert Operations, or PVP Tournaments, you can win lockboxes. Sometimes a lockbox contains CP.
• PVP: Sometimes CP is provided as a reward during the Daily Roulette in PVP. And in PVP Tournament 13, you could win up to 5 CP a day for winning battles.
• Marvel XP Rewards: If you’re signed up for Marvel XP, you can win CP for achieving certain milestones.
• Buying CP for Gold: It costs you 1 gold for 2 cp. Expensive.

“Farming” (playing particular missions over and over again for rewards) is a common element of gaming. In MAA, you will farm for a lot of things, but most often for command points. You can five-star any mission for CP, but that takes a lot of time and effort. However, some missions give you strong chances to earn CP for boss, epic boss, and heroic battles very quickly (i.e. without spending as much time and energy as you would most missions). So which ones are the best? Here’s a list, with the absolute best farming missions at the top.

• 1.12.2: Season 1, Chapter 12, Mission 2 “Ouroboros” is the single best mission for farming CP. Why? Because if you fight all of the bosses in the main mission at once (a difficult task the first few times through), you complete the entire mission at one go, and can win up to 5 CP for the victory. Even better, you get an epic battle appearing immediately afterwards (assuming you send Kitty Pryde on deploy to make the mission available). If you win that, you can win up to 10 CP. You can (potentially) win up to 15 CP for two fights. It doesn’t get any better than that.
  • There’s actually a bit of strategy at play here. You need 30 heroes before you can play any of the missions in Chapter 12. (One of those heroes should be Kitty Pryde for the epic deploy, as already noted.) If you spent your limited collection of CP on expensive heroes and alternate versions and so forth, it will take you a lot longer to get to Chapter 12. You will do yourself a great favor by buying as many of the “cheap” heroes as you can, to get you to that magic number of 30. Once there, you can farm like mad for CP and quickly accumulate enough points to buy the more expensive heroes.
  • It’s also worth considering not five-starring the mission. Yes, you will not earn the 5 CP you get for five-starring, but you will keep the mission level at whatever it was when you first started playing it. As you level up, the mission will become easier and easier to defeat. Eventually you will be able to stroll in with some lower-level hero to accompany Captain America (the team-up) and your agent, kick rump, and win CP.
• 2.1.6: Season 2, Chapter 1, Mission 6 “To Catch a Thief” requires Deadpool and Cable. These, like all of Season 2’s missions, feature “heroic battles,” battles that put the specific heroes in battle by themselves against selected opponents. (You may not have the heroes required for all of the heroic battles, in which case farming these missions becomes less efficient for you.) This mission has an Epic Boss battle. In all, you can win up to 20 CP by completing all the battles in this mission. Nice.
• 2.1.1 and 2.1.2: Season 2, Chapter 1, Mission 1 “Artificial Sweetener” requires Rogue and Gambit, and Season 2, Chapter 1 Mission 2 “Trans-Atlantic” requires Wolverine. The heroic battles and the boss fights take less energy to get to than other missions in Season 2, with the exception of 2.1.6. You can get up to 10 CP from these two victories in each mission.
• 1.12.1, 1.12.3, 1.12.4, and 1.12.5: Like 1.12.2, these five missions allow you to fight all of the bosses in one big brouhaha. One fight, one reward spin with the possibility of up to 5 CP.
• Epic Boss Missions: In order of farming efficiency, these are: 2.1.6, 1.4.4, 2.1.4, 1.3.5, 1.2.3, 1.8.5, 1.5.3, 1.6.3, 1.7.3, 1.11.3, 1.9.4, and 1.10.4. You should know that 1.8.5 is a seven-boss battle royal, so bring your big girl pants for this one. Up to 15 CP for these missions.
• 1.7.3, 1.6.2, 1.1.2 and 1.1.1: These are also good missions for farming. You can get 5 CP for winning these.

Two articles on the MAA Wiki are must-reads for CP farmers: Farming: Or How to Grind and Get Command Points and C is for Command Point, Good Enough for You. Yahoo! Voices writer Michael Strauss writes about Worst Ways to Spend Command Points in Marvel: Avengers Alliance. I actually disagree with some of what Strauss writes, and some of the information in the article is now obsolete (he wrote it in May 2013). For example, while I agree that Luke Cage is a poor hero, you should ignore his advice to not buy him – Luke is needed for some missions, and he isn’t a bad hero for regular missions. You do not want him on your PVP team. I also disagree with his advice not to buy Cable, not the least because you need Cable for the heroic battle in 2.1.6 and because Cable is a good hero. But most of what he writes is solid.

Learn more about command points.

Shield Points

Shield points (SP) are used for a ton of different things, from leveling heroes to researching items to buying store items. You can never have too many. Moreover, you cannot earn them in battle. Here’s some of the best ways of getting them.

• Gifts from allies: You can, and will, get SP as ally gifts. You will appreciate this more at low levels, and less so at higher levels, when you (finally) have a bunch of SP and wish your allies would send you something else.
• Visiting your allies: The random gift collections will give you a good number of SP every day.
• Distress call rewards: Every time an ally uses a distress call from you, you get 1 SP. This is automatic, and it’s what you get when you click those “Redeem Reward” icons that pop up during missions.
• Marvel XP rewards: SP are given as rewards for reaching certain milestones in Marvel XP.
• Daily Rewards: Sometimes SP are offered in the daily roulette spin, but I haven’t seen this in a while.
• Clicking on Facebook posts from the game: Sometimes your allies will “share” their achievements in MAA on their Facebook page. Clicking on these gives you 1 SP.
• Buying SP: One GP for 1 SP. This is absolute madness, unless you are overtly wealthy and just don’t care. Otherwise, save your gold.

I had a chronic shortage of SP until I started getting a lot of allies. Once I got about 30 allies, my SP worries went away. Get allies. Get SP. Simple.

Learn more about shield points.

Energy

Energy is a constant source of irritation for players, especially at lower levels and with fewer allies, when you constantly run out of energy and need to wait (irritating) or spend your cache of energy to keep playing. You can track your energy on the Energy Bar at the top of your screen. You get it at a rate of 1 energy unit every 6 minutes, or 10 per hour. You spend 10 on each battle, which rarely take more than a few minutes to complete. Grrr.

Here’s how you get more.

• Agent leveling: Every time your agent goes up a level, you refill your energy completely. This is irritating when your Energy Bar is almost full and your agent levels up. Try to expend a lot of energy before leveling, just to get more energy for your efforts.
• Gifts from allies: Your allies can give you energy. This is usually the most welcome gift item to give, unless it’s Special Ops season, when everyone wants UISO chips.
• Visiting allies: You get a fair amount of energy from visiting your allies every day.
• Daily Reward: Every day, you get a chance of winning 1 full energy (60 energy points) on the daily spin.
• Buying Energy: 10 energy for 1 GP, 25 for 2 GP, or 60 for 5 GP. Again, unless you’re wealthy and just don’t care what you spend, this is a ridiculous way to spend your gold. Your energy bar will refill itself over time. Send your heroes out on a Flight Deck mission to earn silver and experience points, and go outside or something. Seriously.

Learn more about energy.