MTGO Library Bot 4.75 is out!

ML Bot 4.75 is out. It is faster than previous versions because it is compiled natively for Windows 7

Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas!

Santa Claus is a figure with religious, legendary, mythical, historical origins who, in many western cultures, is said to bring gifts to the homes of the good children during the late evening and overnight hours of Christmas Eve, December 24. He accomplishes this feat with the aid of the elves who make the toys in the workshop and the reindeer who pull his sleigh.I have prepared a few curiosities about Santa.

Well, let’s start with some history. The name “Santa Claus” stems from Saint Nicholas of Myra. He was a 4th century Greek Christian bishop of Myra (now Demre) in Turkey. Nicholas was famous for his generous gifts to the poor, in particular presenting the three impoverished daughters of a pious Christian with dowries so that they would not have to become prostitutes. He was very religious from an early age and devoted his life entirely to Christianity.

In North American tradition (in the United States and Canada), Santa lives on the North Pole, which according to Canada Post lies within Canadian jurisdiction in postal code H0H 0H0 (a reference to "ho ho ho", Santa's notable saying). However, other nations believe he lives somewhere else. For instance, each Nordic country claims Santa's residence to be within their territory. I see regularity here: everyone wants to have Santa close to their homeland and I’m not surprised with it.

Many people think that the red-suited Santa was created as a marketing tool by Coca-Cola and consider it as a symbol of commercialism. They are wrong. It was Thomas Nast, cartoonist, who first created the red-suited Santa. A classic version of Santa Claus was drawn in 1863 for Harper's Weekly. Before then, most depictions of Santa Claus showed a tall, thin man. Nast drew him as the bearded, plump man known today.

There are three stages of a man’s life: He believes in Santa Claus, he doesn’t believe in Santa Claus, he is Santa Claus..


MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Buy it Low or High? Sell it low or high? Profit margin? (Part 1 or 3)

Hello, in these series I will take you around the big dilemma of most bot owners, how high to buy or how cheap to sell. I will explain each one of them and, in the last part, how I've dealt with it on my own bots. Todays topic will be all about buying prices, the advantages, disadvantages, risks and opportunities with each of them.

Buying low:

This sounds like the best option for most new bot owners, the chance of buying cheaply and sell it back at a low price making a quick easy profit sounds great but is not always the best thing to do.


Advantages: Higher profit margin per trade.

Disadvantages: Not attracting to sellers (no suppliers). Costumers that sell to you might feel scammed, not come back, or even spread the word on "how bad" your bot is.
Small / limited collection, not attracting regular buyers.

Risks: None/minimal risk of card value becoming higher than what you paid for it but likely loss of reputation due to the low buying prices.






Buying high:

Bot owners that set higher buy prices look mostly to make sure their regular costumers never need to look at other bots for their needs, having everything in stock, allowing sometimes to sell cards for more than other bots.


Advantages: Higher stock available to sell. Your supplying costumers will come back and recommend your bots to other drafters etc.

Disadvantages: Lower profit margin / possibility to buy cards at a higher value than other bots are selling.

Risks: A sudden card value drop will result in costumers taking advantage of your high buy prices almost instantly, resulting in big losses.

Opportunities: Cards can also go up in value very quickly (as i reviewed before in my fluctuation article). Before Worlds2011 I had 8 Inferno Titan that I've bought for 2.5 each, Hoping to sell for 2.75 (I was buying higher than most bots). On end of the world tournament I was able to sell all 8 of them quickly at a sell price around 9 Event tickets each, resulting in a big profit that I wouldn't get if I was buying cheaply.


On the next part I will be guiding you on the advantages and disadvantages of selling prices.

MTGO Library Bot 4.74 is out!

ML Bot version 4.74 is out, featuring a better connection with the webserver at the end of the trades.

Float (Part 3 of 3)

A long time ago, I was a manager for a retail store. As such, I was responsible for maintaining inventory and cash and doing the bookkeeping for store using company-approved accounting methods. While doing this after a particularly slow day, at the end of the day, there was a negative total. That's right, the store actually lost real money that day.

Not in terms of that the profits were not enough to cover expenses, but in real, absolute terms. Granted, it was not a lot of money, but the profits were less than zero. As the years moved on, I had forgotten about this episode.

Then, I started running my own bots and designed a spreadsheet to track in real terms how much profit I was getting. As the bot was new, the amount of profit was more or less steady with a slight upward tick. But I had days where my absolute profit of a certain day was negative. It actually cost me real money to run the bot that day. I began to wonder why this was happening. Then I realized the problem: float.

Flaot, that concept which many businesses love because people are simply giving a company money for nothing, does have a dark side. When float is redeemed, it causes a negative entry to be entered in the balance-sheet. When the float was given to a company, it is recorded as pure profit. So while in theory nothing really happened that shouldn't, because of the quirks of accounting, I had lost money.

Let's use an example: A new customer comes in, buys a card for .10 and pays with a ticket. Customer now has a .90 credit. As I have no other customers that day, I have gained 1.00 minus the cost of the card, say .06, so profit is .94. Customer returns the next day and uses his .90 on product that cost me .80. Customer now has zero (0) balance. Again, he is my only customer that day. But I gained zero (0) tickets, and .80 of product left the bot, therefore I “lost” .80 for the day.

But if you look at the two days, you see that I gained a ticket, gave up product costing me .86 and my profit is .14. Day 1's profit is .94, day 2 is -.80; totaling .14. So the math works.

I know this can be difficult to follow. But these accounting anomolies do show up when dealing with float.

This concludes this series on float. Next time, I'll tell a story. For those who celebrate, Merry Christmas.

By the way, this weird accounting anomaly is partially to blame for the current economic malaise the globe is experiencing. Profits were unnaturally reported and when the float was redeemed, the losses appeared greater than expected because the profits were never “real”.

MTGO Library Bot 4.73 is out!

ML Bot version 4.73 is out, supporting the wishlist buying mode for the 3 Mercadian Masques set (MM, NE, PR)

Float (Part 2 of 3)

Last time I introduced the concept of float, where a company is given money for future considerations. Today, we'll discuss how this relates to MTGO Library.

MTGO Library uses a credit system, which for all intents and purposes, is float. While there are many customers who prefer the LITE bot system where buying and selling X cards per ticket makes for easy accounting and typically leads to little, if any, float, the PRO bot makes it difficult for those customers who do not wish to deal with minutae. That minutae is what we call credits.

At first glance, looking at these credits doesn't seem like a lot of trouble. Each one is usually under a ticket and customers will simply bookmark any bot they have traded with and come back looking to see if the bot has received that fourth Wall of Omens yet.

But over time and over a customer base, this can really add up. If you look at the credit list of one of my bots, and you total what you see, that total is 20.441 tickets over the top thirteen (13) customers. (The top entry is for my personal account. I want to be able to get whatever I need, whenever I need it.) As you can see, this is not a trivial amount of product. Yes, the credits are still there for those who return to use them but if you look at this list, and your list through the control panel, you will see accounts which have gone dark. More money for you.

But there is a dark side to float, and how this can affect our business, which I will discuss next time.

Float (Part 1 of 3)

As we continue on this Christmas season, let's look at something that didn't exist thirty (30) years ago: the gift card. Oh, it was still possible to get gift certificates for other people but this modern incarnation where every grocery store, every bar, basically every place of commerce has a tiny section where gift cards from restaurants, high end stores, Ebay, MMORPG's and Facebook games can be had there. Why is this happening?

Some of you may say that these are profitable, that they take little shelf space, or list shop-lifting reasons.

Yes, they are profitable as the merchant gets a percentage of each sale of a gift card, but that isn't why there is an explosion.

Yes, they take up little shelf space, which also explains why every merchant seems to be selling DVD's on the side.

Yes, who cares if someone takes a handful as they have no value until the register places value on that card. Which is similar to these pre-paid phone cards model.

While all are valid reasons, the reason gift cards have become popular is something the industry calls float. What is float? It is money that a company has been given for future goods and services to be given at a later date. From that definition, it doesn't sound that great. Until you realize the consequences of exposing the real world to this concept.

First off, there is the obvious benefit of being able to draw interest on float. If a company gives $10,000 in gift cards before Christmas and they are all redeemed a month later, that $10,000 can net a company $50, assuming a .5% monthly rate of return. Doesn't sound like much, but it is a start.

Not everyone redeems their gift cards immediately. This just gives a company more float in interest.

But some gift cards get lost. Now that is the real value of float. Not only do you get the interest from the float, but you also get the float itself. A 2009 study reveals that in the United States alone, the value of unclaimed gift cards exceeds $8,000,000,000 annually. No wonder companies love gift cards.

How does this involve MTGO Library? I'll discuss that next time.

MTGO Library Bot 4.72 is out!

ML Bot 4.72 is out, fixing a major issue with the selection of the WWK, ROE and ZEN sets during Buying Mode.

New settings!

Hello there!
I've changed my autotransfer settings very much since i started my bots, and never really known whats the best. Anyways, I've set some new autotransfer settings again and felt for sharing it and some other thoughts i have come up with lately :)

At the moment i have 4 buying bots and 4 selling bots, each of them numbered 0-4
Once a day my 4 buying bots refills my 3 last selling bots, 1-3.
Leaving bot 0 unrefilled. Though, after all transfers are done to selling bots 1-3, those bots refill bot 0, which results in that bot 0 has all cards in stock (That any of my bots owns of course), making it easier for my buying customers.

Every monday, wednesday and friday my last 3 selling bots transfers all their tickets to my first selling bot, Swebot. On tuesdays, thirsdays and saturdays my Swebot spreads the tickets out on my buying bots (At the moment they are set to refill until 75) but usually i keep them refilled to 150. The reason i lowered to 75 is that I've raised my buying prices for mythic and rare cards pretty much latest time, mythics and rares are now set to buy at +10% of ML bot pricelist. Which have been resulting in my bots buying alot more cards, so my amount of tickets are running lower then usual. Though everyone should know that the more distinct cards a bot has, the more customers it will get!

All my buying bots are set to buy up to 4x of each card and they are set to refill up to 4x to my selling bots. I really don't thing that there's any reason to have more then 4x of any card on the same bot. Although, when i refill my buying bots from my stock account i refill up to 8x of all cards. So that the buying bots wont just take 4, transfer them to my selling bots and then buy 4 new of the same card that i already have in stock. Since that's a waste of tickets.

At the moment Swebot has approximately 59.500 cards, with no more then 4x of each card!
That's about 15000 distinct cards! I have seen bots with 70.000+ cards, at first it seems nice. But when you check how many of each card they have in stock it often works out to about 10000 distinct cards or less. A good bot doesn't just have a large stock, a good bot has a large stock with a large amount of distinct cards!

And also as I mentioned in my last post, I've created a forum! But it's still lacking users! It's really hard to start a forum since if having no users no one else will come. But if some people get there and write some threads it will for sure attract more users! So go to http://www.mtgoswebot.com/Forum, register an account and write a something about yourself! :)

/Sebastian

Advantages of a bot owner, "the drafter" Part 2 of 2

Hello, today I will be guiding you through part 2 of my review about the advantages of a bot owner, this time as a drafter.

This is not a guide on how to make profit as a drafter, since thats something I can't teach you in a simple blog post. Drafting is almost a form of gambling, where paying around 13-15$ worth of Event Tickets(or packs) will grant you an average of 3-10$ worth in cards and a chance of getting packs as extra. If you're looking for a safe profit, I wouldn't recommend drafting, but if you're already a drafter and regularly sell all you get into a random bot, then this guide might help you get more for your cards.



Bot type
You will be generating many cards, some which might be worth 10-20 event tickets, others that might be worth almost nothing and that you might already have 10+ in stock. Ideally I would recommend you to set 2 bot accounts, possibly one Lite, one Pro. Also, as your main goal is to sell, you might want to tune down your buying prices. You will not get tickets instantly for the cards you just drafted with but, in the long run, you will get more out of them.

Pro version:

This will be the bot that will likely feed (or help to feed) your drafting "addiction". the reason why you need the pro version is to make sure you will sell the expensive cards at a market price, so instead of selling a card to another bot for 16 which he would sell back at 19, you might just sell it yourself quickly at 18.5 on your own bot, making 2.5 extra event tickets that you wouldn't do without a bot.

Booster Packs:

You might also want the pro bot to buy packs at a very competitive price (even if just 0.01 under the usual bots sell price) and this is mostly because of costumers that sell them to you at, for example, 3.71 will come back to deal with your bot with the 0.71 credit they have or, in some cases, forget about it meaning that you might get some packs at simply 3 Event tickets.

Lite Version:

This is likely to be useful for the bulk amount of the same cards you have, wont make a huge difference to what you would get for those cards in comparison to selling them to a bulk bot but at least this one will take them (while most bots wouldn't even pick them, or not pick enough to reach a Event ticket worth).
This will also make bot costumers that like to pick a few cheap common/uncommon cards happy and possibly come back.

Conclusion:

Drafting can be expensive if you don't have regular results, but with the help of bots you can minimize the costs or amplify the profits if you're a good drafter. Always keep in mind the costs and if you're not making enough wins, stop, research about the sets you're drafting with and take a break. Drafting straight after your last loss usually results in making bad decisions.
Good luck drafting and selling your cards!

Insert Pithy Title Here

Last time we discussed some of the administrator commands found in MTGO, which are accessed by an administer user entering those commands when prompted when in a trade with the bot in question. Today, we're going to discuss the rest of the commands:

upscreen = takes a screenshot and uploads it

Again, another self-explanatory command. Why would you desire this command? This is more for showing specifically what is going wrong. From a programmer's perspective, things that are not working need to be spelled out. For instance, if you tell a mechanic that your car “makes a funny noise”, it is not very helpful. But if you say that the engine makes this specific sound and these are the other things I've noticed, then the mechanic has a place to start looking. In the same manner, a screenshot helps us find out the error, and fix the bot in a future update.

at = auto transfer

This is useful when you simply want to transfer a bunch of cards from one account to another, with no conditions attached. For example:

Let's say you win an auction on Ebay and the seller gives you the account for two weeks to clear out the 15,000 cards. You can do this manually but it is an annoying thing to do. However, if you give this mule account temporary administrator rights, you can enter trade with your bot, and enter the at command, and a minute later, 75 cards will be in queue for transfer. Yes, you will still have to confirm and such, but you certainly can watch television and not worry about clicking the mouse button thousands of times while transferring cards.

fee = prompts the total renting fee

This can be helpful depending on what method you use to lease the bot. One thing to remember is that one does not need to be be logged into MTGO to get this information if one is on vacation: you can simply enter the Control Panel and not only get that fee, but also make a payment, be it with Paypal cash or MTGO tickets. The choice is yours.

That concludes this series of little-known bot features, and the mini-mini-series of controlling your bot while on vacation. I look forward to that.

How about a forum?

Hello there!

Me and the owner of the BestDeal bot chain have been speaking a bit in the past about where users can turn if they want to contact other bot users, for tips or just simple discussions.

This blog were a really good idea from Albert, but I don't really think it's enough.

Since there was no forum for bot users it I decided to create one. I made it so that the bot community will grow, also so that bot users can get help and tips easier.

I hope that you will think that this was a good initiative and that you will use it. Right now the forum only got the basic features that a forum should have to work. But if people will start using it i will continue the developing of it.

The first things i will start making on the forum is a list of scammers and bot abusers. So if you have had contact of any please write in that specific thread on the forum!

The forum is located on www.mtgoswebot.com/Forum.

Regards,

Sebastian

Remote Bot Administration

Last time I discussed my experience of bot maintenance while on vacation. I mentioned that I was able to remotely control the bot. Let's discuss that in a little more detail. But first, there are pre-requisites:

[A] Tick the checkbox to enable an administrator mode.

[B] Enter the account which will be able to enter administrator commands

Then, when you need to, just enter the command you wish to execute. We'll discuss a few today and the rest next time.

help = gives a list of available commands

kill = close the bot, close MTGO

shut = close the bot, close MTGO and shut down the computer

m restart = restarts MTGO

b restart = restarts MTGO and the bot

mode = mode 1; mode 2; mode 3; changes working mode where 1 = buying; 2 = selling; 3 = both

Each of these are fairly self-explanatory. Usage is simple. Log into MTGO with your administrator account, open a trade with your bot and when the bot recognizes you as an administrator, then enter the command, and that's it.

Nothing Earth-shattering here I know. Just meat-and-potatoes commands that do nothing flashy, won't directly make you money, but are features that if you need them, you know are there.

Advantages of a bot owner, "the casual player" Part 1 of 2

This week I will be guiding you through the advantages of being a bot owner. Starting with the one I use the most, since I play more as a casual player than a professional.

As most casual players, I spend a big part of my time in MTGO tuning, testing and building new decks, trying to bring them a step closer to perfection. Today I will be giving you some tips on how to do it the cheapest way possible.

Having a bot will instantly give you a huge saving when building a new deck since you might have most of  the cards in stock which you've bought under the market's sell price, but sometimes your bot wont have all the cards you need. I will show you how you can use your bot to get them for you, cheaper than buying off another bots and in some cases ending up with profit.


Step 1: Do not buy it

Sometimes we buy cards and after play-testing realize that they just don't work. Buying to test can be avoided and the best way to do it is to test them first on paper with proxies, do some research online by comparing your deck to similar decks or discussing it in forums .

Step 2:  Personal Prices

This is a basic way to just get a card cheaper, this week i needed 4 Sword of War and Peace, instead of buying a playset at 4x 20.5-21.5 at the cheapest bots I took advantage of the higher current buying prices of 17-18.5 Event tickets. Setting my buy price at 19.25 resulted in buying 4 Sword of War and Peace at a total of 77 within 24 hours, instead of 82-86, saving me at least 5 Event Tickets.
Not everyone uses Wikiprice, so if you need a card fast and you're buying it for more than every other bot, you need to advertise it. Players will sell it to you after a quick search if they know you're the highest buyer.

Step 3: Classifieds/Trading Room Message

To make sure I was advertising the card, I could manually type Sword of War and Peace |19.25| between my advertised buying prices. Instead I wrote: #buy_NPH_>19#   this way the bot would always advertise it until having the 4 I needed and then stop, since that was the only NPH card i was buying for over 19 tickets. Another method to do this is using the CardsForAdvertisement.txt in your bot folder.

Buying like this will also make sure you wont have a loss after you sell them for the cheapest market price ( currently at 20.5) giving you some profit while having fun playing casually.


Soon I will talk about the advantages of owning a bot as a drafter.

Hurricanes on Vacation

I have a copy of my bots on my laptop. Purely as a backup. However, I never realized how important that little investment would turn out to be. You see, my company paid for me and the family to take a vacation and we decided to visit the In-laws. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

Before we left on vacation, I shut the power to everything but the bots. I fully expected the bots to remain in operation while we were enjoying mandatory family time.

However, after we left a hurricane decided to visit. Since I went through hurricanes Andrew, Katrina, and Wilma, I know what can happen and what needs to be done.

The hurricanes were on a direct path for my house. What's a bot owner to do? Simple, I simply started the laptop and started to run the bots, and I remotely shut down the computer running my bot.

But how did you do that 2,000 miles away?

Easy. I opened a trade with the bots and entered the command to shut down the bot using the shut command. You see, if you have set up an account as administrator, you have access to some commands that can be used for a variety of things. In this case, I could use the kill or shut commands to terminate the bots and run the bots off the laptop.

Next time we'll look at more administrator commands. Oh, and how did this episode end? We lost power for a couple of weeks, so I had my family stay with her parents and I came back as scheduled to deal with the cleanup and post-hurricane chaos that exists. When power was restored, my wife shut down the bots on the laptop, and I started up the bots as normal on the bot machine. Downtime throughout this entire ordeal, just minutes.

Price drop

Some of you may wonder why prices dropped so drastically last days. Well, two factors caused it. Firstly, Inistrad set is not available to redeem anymore. INI is temporary out of stock and there is no estimated time of arrival. Err..but what is redemption? Magic Online includes an innovative feature that allows players who have collected a complete set of digital cards to redeem it for a complete set of physical cards. To redeem a set, you must have at least one of every card from the set you are trying to redeem in your collection and you can turn your virtual card staples into the paper ones. All cards must be regular(foil) to redeem a regular(foil) set. Only full sets can be redeemed. I would like to point out that majorly redemption accelerate the growth of prices, especially mythics. Consequently, by the time Wizards resume the redemption, prices will be much lower than they used to be. Let me visualize you how prices changed. One week before, the full Inistrad set was worth about 130 event tickets, whereas it is merely 110 event tickets now. Second factor which is responsible for such low prices is release of Mercadian Masques block. As a result, we may observe intensive sales of cards by players who are willing to play drafts, but they do not have spare tickets to do so. Take advantage of that and set lower prices than you usually do. In my opinion INI did hit the bottom and prices will gradually raise in a next few weeks until Dark Ascension(second set from INI) comes online.

MTGO Library Bot 4.71 is out!

Welcome to ML Bot 4.71, fixing a large number of (small) issues of the previous versions.

Posting message on Classified is now more reliable; the final confirm window is better handled and the chance to "overbuy" (buy too many copies of a card) are reduced to minimum.

MTGO Library Bot 4.70 is out!

ML Bot 4.70 is out, introducing the new sets "Mercadian Masques" (MM), "Nemesis" (NE) and "Prophecy" (PR).

As usual, you can find the updated price list in the installer, in the Online Control Panel, and for free during the (automatic) update from version 4.69 (and older) to 4.70.

Vacation Features

In our continuing series on little-known bot features that can be used on vacation, let's take a look at a scenario:

You're on Christmas vacation, visiting relatives for the obligatory vacation. Since you deck the special events on MTGO, you see that there is a constructed event you wish to partake in.

However, you know that you also need four (4) copies of Garruk Relentless or your deck simply will not be competitive.

You also know that this card is pretty tough to find and you simply do not have the opportunity to spend a couple of hours seeking Garruk Relentless and comparing prices for it. So what is a bot owner to do?

Why not advertise that you are buying it?

But I'm on vacation having one of those obligatory meals with relatives, remember?

So? Are you going to let the fact that you can not access the bot without using some VPN software stop you? Just log into your MTGO Library Control Panel and change your advertising message. (Found here: http://www.mtgolibrary.com/control-panel.php?w=admessages )

This feature gets lost in the plethora of options listed on Control Panel page but nonetheless, still is quite useful. You simply change your classified message that you are seeking Garruk Relentless and then when a trade comes in, you'll receive notification on your smartphone. (Assuming you've set up the appropriate email filters.) Then you excuse yourself from dinner for a few minutes, pick up Garruk Relentless and return to dinner; satisfied that your bot is working for you while you are enjoying a family meal with your relatives, and ready to kick some arse in that tournament shortly.

There is a caveat though: the advertising messages get updated once an hour so it will take a little time for the message to actually be posted. So while this method won't get you cards in under two (2) hours, it could if you gave it a day or so.

Join us next time when we continue our trip through little known bot features.

Influences on cards value (Part 3 of 3)

In the previous parts I've shown how to predict and detect card fluctuation as soon as possible.
Today I will be showing you how to price your cards to take full advantage of it.

Pushing up your buy prices
When it comes to manually pricing a card I always try to buy for more than most other bots and sell for less, it seems ideal, but not always possible. In cards where value is very stabilized its safer to push the buying price closer to the selling price, whilst cards that tend to fluctuate are riskier.

As an example, Inferno Titan is priced at about 8.5 while Sword of Body and Mind is selling for about 7.75 but  I am buying the Sword at a higher price (6.5) than the Titan (6.25). The reason for this is because I am confident that in 2 weeks time the Equipment value should still be over the 6.5 Event tickets I paid, while the Red giant might not.

With the well known Cycle of Investor Emotions I would set Inferno Titan as going through an Euphoria or Anxiety phase.






Changing your prices in PersonalPrices.txt
Firstly you will need to remember that any price listed in the PersonalPrices.txt will ignore all other modifiers (Cardsmtgo3.txt, correction rates, personalpercentages.txt, limits and quantities) unless left blank.
My guide to do this is to play safe if you are unsure and push buy prices higher only if you feel confident to do so, as you see cards value fluctuating you will be able to identify which cards are the safe and risky ones.

On value fIuctuation I follow this small rule:
If a card value goes up, increase the selling price quickly to market price and slowly increase the buying price (0.2 per day or so).
If a card value drops and you own the card slowly decrease the selling price (0.2 per day or so) or if you don't drop it straight into the current market selling price, drop the buy price straight to market price in either situations.

Here is an example of how I manually priced my Inferno Titans before, during and after the Worlds 2011 tournament following this rule:



Conclusion
Might sound strange but never feel tempted in raising very quickly the buying price on a card that just gone up due to recent success because if it drops in value it results in a loss.
When running multiple bots it might be best to set buying quantities as low as 1 on cards that you buy really high, avoid buying multiple playsets in a matter of minutes. This might be crucial in case of an unexpected price drop (as happened before on standard banning of "Jace, the Mind Sculptor" and "Stoneforge Mystic" earlier this year). 

Also remember to keep PersonalPrices.txt regularly updated since those prices wont be affected by updating your mtgocards3.txt Price list! :)

MTGO Library Bot 4.69 is out!

The Mtgo update of today slightly changed the bottom-left menu, and, as result, the bot was no more able to read it correctly. In particular, the bot wasn't able to post the messages on the Classified board.

MTGO Library Bot version 4.69 fixes the issue.

You've Got Mail Part 2

Last time we interrupted our series on little known bot features to introduce a new feature which ironically can used on vacation; the email at the end of trade. Currently, this is a mandatory feature, meaning that you will receive these emails whether you like it or not. However, this is not going to be permanent as there will be several email options coming to the bot control panel in the near future. For now though, let's discuss what we can do with these emails.

To answer that question, it all depends on what you want to do with these emails. If you have a large bot chain, or simply do not wish to be bothered with the individual trades as they happen, then simply set up a filter to delete the emails as they come in.

Just simply set up a filter which states anything from trades.no-reply@mtgolibrary.com gets deleted. Then you simply do not have to deal with them.

If you want to study the trades as they come in, then set up a filter and instead of deleting the email, simply move the emails to that folder.

All of that is self-explanatory. However, let's say you want Garruk Relentless but do not wish to pay another bot for the card. After all, what's the point of having a bot buys cards for you if it can not get a card for you when you want one? Just set up a filter that states when the bot makes a trade for that card, have it not just filtered to a folder, but to send a copy to your smartphone. That's right, now you do not have to choose between setting all cards as trade-able but losing out on a specific card you want or letting all cards be trade-able and grabbing what you when you want it as you will be notified when it happens.

Next time we'll continue our look at little-known bot features that one can use while on vacation.

Influences on cards value (Part 2)

In my last article I explained how certain card's value spike after being successfully used on tournaments. Today I will teach 3 (three) methods that you can use to predict possible cards that might be currently undervalued and be going up in the future.



Interviews

Interviews can be a great tool to evaluate cards before a new set comes out, this will give you a heads up on which cards might be the "bombs" of a new set and which ones wont work as well, making 2 (two) different cards that might be at a similar value on a release swerve into different directions, just like the Mythic Skaab Ruinator's value dropped down to about 2 (two) Event Tickets and the rare Snapcaster Mage's value is still steady at about 10 (ten) Event tickets.



Live Events

You don't have to wait for the tournaments results to know which cards did well, watching interviews where the top players reveal what they are taking into a big event or watching the event live are a great tool to determine those cards even before there is a top8 announced.
Jun’ya Iyanaga, the Worlds 2011 champion, had 4 (four) copies of Inferno Titan, making his deck very different from most "Kessig Titan". While watching the live coverage of the event, I didn't need to wait for the third game of the final match to know that Inferno Titan's value was going up.



Articles

Articles are a fundamental tool on new sets pre-release, since they will show you all the possible new decks with both new cards, and previous set cards that were cheap before, this also includes set spoilers because they will show you which classic cards you might already have that are going to be reprinted in a new set, causing their value to go up or possibly down depending on the current rarity or price of that card.

You can find articles like this on the official Magic the Gathering articles "Daily MTG" or in any other unofficial site such as the MTGO Library blog.



In Part 3 I will talk about the correct way to change the price on specific cards on MTGO library bot, taking full advantage of these fluctuations.

Magic the Gathering Worlds

After four days of fierce competition, Worlds 2011 in present form came to an end. In next year Worlds will look totally different, because winning the National Championship will not authorize you to participation in Worlds. Only top16 players around the world will play there. To be in exclusive top16 you must fulfill one of these conditions: be 2011 World Champion or Magic Online Champion, be winner of Pro Tour, be the top-ranked player from each geo-region, be the top-ranked player in the worldwide Planeswalker Points. By now, everyone had realistic chance to take part in Worlds, whereas in 2012 it is almost not viable for average mortal. We will watch the same faces every year during future Worlds with low chances of any new pro player revelation. Anyway, the winner of 2011 Worlds is Jun'ya Iyanaga from Japan. He played red-green Wolf Run Ramp teched to smash all agro decks. Iyanaga defeated Richard Bland of England 3-0 in the finals. I’m not going to focus on game or neither their good nor bad plays, but on something what should interest every bot owner: producing extra tickets. Let me show present you how accurately prices changed during first day of Worlds. One of players come up with a new deck running Olivia Voldaren and did 5-1 result. Market reacted immediately. Price of this card raised from 2 tickets up to 9 what is 450% return on investment during one night. Other example might be Primeval Titan 11->16 or Inferno Titan 4->8. Personally, I loathe being ripped by those who knew such new decklist faster than me. I recommend you all to read articles or watch live coverage from such events. Thanks to this action you will never sell your cards below the market price.

MTGO Library Bot 4.67 is out!

ML Bot 4.67 fixes an issue with the reload of Mtgo on some computers.

Influences on cards value (Part 1)

One of the most important things in the business world is to predict and know how to take advantage of value fluctuating. In Magic the Gathering, there are many factors that can cause certain cards value to fluctuate, raise or drop.

In this series I will explain each one of them and in the end, tell you how to take full advantage of those value swings.


Tournaments/Event results
At major tournaments, usually the value of cards present in the top 8 decks and specially the winning one will likely spike for a few days. You will have to be able to identify the difference between a general value increase and a short term peak of demand. These can be determined by how long these cards have been present and how steady their value as been or how new cards and set rotations interact with them.



Generally speaking, Cards like Inferno Titan, which was present in the MTG Worlds 2011 winning deck are likely to be going through an euphoria phase and start dropping into their real value anytime soon, turning it into a risky card to buy just under the current sell price.



On part 2 I will tell you how to predict these fluctuations instead of reacting to them.

MTGO Library Bot 4.66 is out!

Version 4.66 features a number of small patches to make the bot smoother and smarter.

ML Bot 4.66 has also a lighter and better connection to our server.

You've Got Mail (Part 1)

We interrupt this series on little known bot features that you can utilize on vacation to discuss a new feature, which ironically, can also be used on vacation.. the Email after trades feature.

You probably noticed this sometime on Sunday when this feature went live when you started seeing these emails coming to your email address which you used to register your bot(s). Currently, the emails contain the basic information that is available when you use the website. A trade which one of my bots performed is listed below:

Mtgo Library Bot trades Report

Buddy name:	XXXXXXX|XXXXXXXXXXX
Modality:	Selling
Details:	01x Blight Mamba (SOM,regular) 0.004 01x Burning Vengeance (ISD,regular) 0.013 01x Chancellor of the Spires (NPH,foil) 0.144 01x Chancellor of the Tangle (NPH,foil) 0.149 01x Contested War Zone (MBS,regular) 0.031 01x Crossway Vampire (ISD,regular) 0.004 01x Despise (NPH,regular) 0.013 01x Divine Reckoning (ISD,regular) 0.028 03x Feeling of Dread (ISD,regular) 0.005 01x Fresh Meat (NPH,foil) 0.252 01x Geist-Honored Monk (ISD,regular) 0.405 01x Ghost Quarter (ISD,foil) 0.013 01x Gideon%5C%27s Lawkeeper (M12,regular) 0.007 01x Gitaxian Probe (NPH,regular) 0.007 01x Glimmerpost (SOM,regular) 0.007 02x Goblin Fireslinger (M12,regular) 0.007 01x Gruesome Encore (MBS,foil) 0.013 01x Hand of the Praetors (SOM,foil) 0.403 02x Heartless Summoning (ISD,regular) 0.450 01x Hinterland Harbor (ISD,regular) 1.431 02x Intangible Virtue (ISD,regular) 0.013 01x Invisible Stalker (ISD,regular) 0.013 01x Invisible Stalker (ISD,foil) 0.013 01x Manic Vandal (M12,regular) 0.004 01x Mental Misstep (NPH,regular) 0.013 01x Moment of Heroism (ISD,regular) 0.004 01x Naturalize (M12,regular) 0.005 01x Night Terrors (ISD,regular) 0.004 01x Stonehorn Dignitary (M12,regular) 0.007 01x Stony Silence (ISD,regular) 0.031 01x Stromkirk Noble (ISD,regular) 1.926 01x Thraben Sentry (ISD,regular) 0.005 01x Timely Reinforcements (M12,regular) 0.013 01x Turn the Tide (MBS,foil) 0.006 03x Unruly Mob (ISD,regular) 0.004 01x Witchbane Orb (ISD,regular) 0.121
Value:	6.056 tixs, 43 cards involved
Incoming tixs:	7
Old buddy credits:	0
New Buddy credits:	0.944 (6.056 + 0 - 7)
Tix you have:	56
Trade fee:	0 ( 0% - pro license )
Total renting fee:	0.5
Screenshots:	Screenshot 1 - Screenshot 2

The information is fairly basic. It lists the bot and the user who did business with the bot. It tells you if the bot bought, sold, or traded. Sets, and foil status as well as price per card is listed along with the totals. The screenshots are hyperlinks so you can click on them and see the actual trades.

Personally, I never get tired of seeing trades like this. A new customer and a large transaction. What's not to like?

Next time, I'll go into more details and how we can use these emails to better get a handle on our business.

Emails at the end of the trades

Hello,

as most of you noticed, we introduced a new feature, the "emails" at the end of the trades. These emails will be delivered in real time and report the details of the trade in a synthetic manner.

Personally I believe this is a great feature to control the bot in real time, especially if you have a smartphone and  a mobile internet connection.

The service is still "beta", there are still a couple of minor issues but we are working on them.

Vacations

One of the things that is mentioned whenever a person is seriously considering starting a business is that the person should not expect to take a vacation for at least the first three (3) years and most likely first five (5) years in operation. This is because you are so involved in its day to day operation and many startups can not afford the reliable help needed so that a business can actually operate reliably while the owner is sitting on a beach cut off from the outside world.

Fortunately for us, we do not have to worry about the bot running reliably. In the unlikely event of a problem, we can reboot the bot or the machine running the bot. If there is a tweak that needs to be made, we simply do it.

However, how do you run a bot while you are on vacation?

Sure you can run some VNC clone and remotely administer your bot that way. I did that when I was running YATbot. But I've found running VNC a little cumbersome, slow (this was years ago so the speed was an issue then, not so much now), and I just had an irksome feeling that some random probe could send a command and take over my bot machine as I had to leave an open port, a back door if you will, on my bot machine. It simply never felt right and it was always a conflict in my mind: Leave an open port but but be able to remotely administer the bot; or close the port, be secure but also be out of luck should something happen.

Fortunately for us, yet again, is that MTGO Library has several features that can be used for remote administration and this going to be the focus for the next few entries, as we wrap up the bigger topic of little known bot features. For readers in the United States, have a Happy Thanksgiving.

This is for Professionals Only.

One of the biggest advantages of Magic Library is that you can simply install it, spend five (5) minutes customizing it, and setting it loose without any fear that you will be ripped off or after five (5) days, will have yet to make a trade.

In our continuing series on little known bot features, we're going to look at a feature found only in the Professional Version. (Lite Users are free to skip this article so long as you resume next time.) The feature in question is the Limits Tab.

This is a totally optional feature. It is not needed for the bot to operate normally. However, spending a little time here can definitely increase profits and/or decrease expenses, so we're going to spend a few moments looking over this easily overlooked feature.

As the name implies, this tab is where you set the limits. The limits are the MINIMUM the bot will sell a card for and the MAXIMUM the bot will pay to purchase a card. Let's look at an example:

Let's assume that there is a Mythic Rare which sells for four (4) tickets and will be bought for three (3) tickets. Normally the bot will handle this card like any other card.

Now let's add the caveat that you are just starting out and have a limited about of tickets which you can devote to increase your inventory. Using this tab, you can set limits so that you can purchase more cards instead of using your limited amount of capital on a few high-valued objects.

So we can set the tab to never spend more than one (1) ticket for a Mythic. This way, the bot will use THIS setting instead of the market price for the bot. The bot will still purchase the inexpensive Mythics, even at the market price. But by setting this tab, you won't be using all your tickets on a few select cards.

It may sound simplistic and it may sound like a useless feature. However, I've found this a very useful tool when I started using MTGO Library from Yatbot. It allowed me to increase my inventory without running out of tickets.

Next time, we're going to discuss a Go-Go song.

Copy and Paste Magic

In our continuing series on little used MTGO bot features, I'm going to refer the reader back to my prior series, Building Your Own Bot Server. I went over the advantages of not using a backup but of installation of Windows and MTGO because of the increased stability. What I neglected was that I do not do ALL of this. That's right, I cheat.

How do I cheat when installing a new bot or moving a bot to another machine? I do manually install Windows and the updates and MTGO. Doing this is not any great chore as for the most part, the installation is painless, just a time consuming background task.

However, when it comes to setting up the details of the bots, such as how many of each card to pick, which sets to buy, etc, I do not do that. Instead, I simply restore the settings from the backup.

What do you mean, restore the settings from backup?

Exactly that. If you look in the Magic Library folder, you will see two (2) files:

[botname]user.data

[botname]buyerSetting.data

Each of these is a simple file which houses all the particular settings of your bot. You copy these files and transfer them to another machine. Then you're done. No more micromanaging settings and clicking all those check boxes.

But wait! There's more!

Once a day, Magic Library takes a backup of these settings. If you look in the “setting backup” folder, you will see files in the “dd-mm[botname]user.data” and “dd-mm[botname]buyerSetting.data” format. This way, if there is a corruption somewhere, you can restore those settings by using the proper files from a time when the bot was working flawlessly. (Dropping off the date part first.)

That's it and now you're back in business. Next time we'll continue the series on little used bot features,