How much time will I spend?

One of the first questions coming to mind when starting a bot is “How much time will I spend on it”? For newcomers this is an hard-to-answer question, since the Magic Online business is so peculiar that it cannot be modeled on another business' shape.

Luckly, the bot is mostly self-sufficient, and furthermore you can control it from remote via the Online Control Panel. This saves a huge amount of time. If you want to run the bot for a week without even touching it, you can. The bot will automatically update the prices and handle the downtimes and all the dirt stuff for you.

If you are willing to invest a bit more time, then you can set prices for hot cards using PersonalPrices.txt. This works well and will take one or two hours every couple of days. In fact setting prices manually is probably the most time consuming task behind running a bot. Thus, you can have it totally automated and spend zero time on your bot, or -at the very opposite- update prices manually every day and spend a couple of hours per day.

The tradeoff is up to you, there is no a priori “good” or “bad” strategy :-)