28-0 has two parts: a draft you control completely, and a season you don't control at all. Everything you decide happens in the first sixty seconds. After that the simulation takes your build through twenty-eight matches and reports back. This page explains what each decision is actually doing.
Each round offers two cards drawn from a pool of forty-eight players across their career eras. You pick one. There are no re-rolls and no takebacks, and the card you didn't take is gone. The six rounds always come in the same order: serve, forehand, backhand, movement, return, then mentality.
Every card belongs to a specific season, tagged Breakout, Prime or Veteran. A breakout card has higher raw output and noticeably worse reliability β the shot is there, the repeatability isn't. A veteran card has lost pace and speed but often gained composure. A player only has the eras they've actually lived: there is no veteran Alcaraz card, because that season hasn't happened yet.
The draft also runs an anti-repetition filter. Once a player appears, their odds of appearing again in the same run drop sharply, and the last three completed runs are weighted down as well. That's there so you don't end up building peak Djokovic six times in a row and so the deeper names β Safin, Hewitt, Nalbandian, Henin β actually surface.
Serve (20% of your rating). Pace is how much free damage the delivery does; Placement is how reliably it lands where you want. A big Pace number wins you cheap points and matters more at Wimbledon than anywhere else. Weak Placement shows up in long matches, when second serves start getting attacked.
Forehand (20%). Power and Control. This is the shot most builds win points with, and it's weighted evenly between the two attributes, so a lopsided forehand card is genuinely a compromise rather than a bargain.
Backhand (20%). Drive and Precision, weighted slightly toward Precision. The backhand is the shot that gets attacked, so repeatability counts for more here than on the forehand side. A high-Drive, low-Precision backhand tends to hold up in short matches and leak in long ones.
Movement (15%). Speed and Endurance. Movement is the quietest stat on the draft screen and one of the most punishing to skimp on. It drives your entire clay-court game, and it carries a hard failure mode: if your final Movement rating falls below 60, every match carries a 10% chance that a set simply collapses 6-1 regardless of how good the rest of your build is. That's fatigue, and it has ended a lot of promising runs.
Return (15%). Aggression and Timing, weighted toward Timing. Return is how you break serve, which is how you win matches you'd otherwise split. It's the stat most players under-draft because the payoff isn't as visible as a big forehand number.
Mentality (10%). Nerve and Focus. This is the smallest slice of your rating and the one that decides the most matches, because of how it's applied β see below.
Every card, not just the mentality card, carries a small Clutch modifier shown as a chip: Clutch +8, Clutch -6. Those modifiers from all six of your picks are added together and folded into your final Mentality rating. Draft six talented head-cases and your mentality collapses even if the mentality card itself was strong.
This matters because Mentality gets double weight in two specific situations: any set that reaches a tiebreak, and any deciding fifth set. So a build with a mediocre overall rating but excellent nerve wins matches it statistically shouldn't, and a beautiful build with a poor temperament loses finals. If you've ever wondered why a 91-rated player keeps losing in tiebreaks, that's the reason.
Each Slam adjusts your effective rating before a ball is struck.
Wimbledon (grass) pays a bonus on Serve and quietly taxes reliance on Movement. A serve-first build overperforms here β this is where an Isner or IvaniΕ‘eviΔ card earns its keep.
Roland Garros (clay) pays on Movement and on the average reliability across your whole build, and it taxes a serve-only game. Rallies are long, so anything fragile gets exposed. Clay is where under-drafted Movement turns from a small weakness into a lost tournament.
The Australian Open and US Open (hard) are neutral. No bonus, no penalty β your raw rating is what plays.
Four Slams in calendar order, seven rounds each, best of five sets. A loss ends that tournament but not your run β you still go on to the next Slam, exactly as a real player would. That's why records look like 23-1 rather than adding up to 28: losing in the round of 32 means the quarterfinal, semifinal and final are never played. Twenty-eight is a ceiling, not a denominator.
There's a baseline upset chance in every match no matter how far ahead you are, and the difficulty tightens as a run goes deep. Both are deliberate. Without the upset floor, a strong build would be untouchable and the result would mean nothing; without the late tightening, most runs would die early and feel like a bad draft rather than a near miss.
Don't let Movement fall below 60. The fatigue rule is the single most common cause of a run dying for reasons the player didn't understand. If you've taken two low-movement cards early, the movement round is not the place to chase a shiny alternative.
Watch the Clutch chips as you go, not at the end. Three cards at -5 will cost you more matches than one card at +8 will win. The modifier is easy to ignore because it's small on each card and large in aggregate.
Reliability travels better than power. Consistency-side attributes feed the clay bonus and hold up over five sets. Raw power wins the highlight and loses the long match.
Veteran cards are not a trap. They read worse at a glance because the headline numbers are lower, but the composure gain is real and it's applied where matches are decided. An old card with +6 Clutch is often the correct pick over a breakout card with -6.
Perfect Player takes the same database and asks a different question. Instead of six cards, you get twelve spins β one legend at a time β and you take a single attribute from each before they disappear. Serve Pace from one, Backhand Precision from another, Nerve from a third, until all twelve slots are filled.
Then, instead of one season, the game plays out an entire fifteen-year career with an ageing curve, and reports what you actually won: Slams by tournament, Masters titles, weeks at world number one, Olympic gold, and Laureus awards. Classic mode shows you every number as you draft. Expert hides them until the reveal, so you're drafting on what you know about the players rather than what's on the screen.
Both modes are free and neither requires an account. Go and build one.