Expanding Business

BestDeal Chain now up to 10 Bots

In May 2011, BestDeal bot was created by me with the hope of having a bot that could feed my love for playing Magic Online casually. This bot started as a lite bot, and very quickly I realized that some of the cards the bot was buying were worth much more than he was selling them for, it was time for my first expansion one month later, June 2011, that's when I created BestDeal2, this became the Lite bot, feeding BestDeal, now a PRO bot. This was enough for a while, but as any other business, when you have the willpower to go above, there's always room for improvement.

I wanted turn my chain into a one stop chain that would please every kind of MTGO player,
from the drafter that wants top offers for his newly picked mythics and somewhere to get rid of all the junk commons, the casual player that wants commons for much less than 1 penny and the "rich guy" that doesn't mind to pay a little bit more for a card, just because he is able to get all his needs from one bot.

This is when I've decided to make a price scaling chain, where each bot would buy for less and sell for less gradually, being BestDeal the highest buyer, down to the last bot which would sell the cheapest (and buy the lowest).

Two months later I pursued this dream, creating BestDeal3 and 4, these would now be the lite bots, and BestDeal and BestDeal2 the pro bots. BestDeal2 started using the old BestDeal corrections, while BestDeal now started buying at higher corrections (rares/mythics +30% pricelist).  This is also when I decided that each bot (other than BestDeal4) would not buy up to 8 cards but only 4 instead , each bot would then be refilled up to 8 cards from the next bot. This is when I noticed how many decent commons and uncommons (such as oblivion ring, lightning bolt, etc) were being sold for a decent profit on BestDeal while getting refilled from the chain, meaning that they being bought for much less in BestDeal4.

While this was working well, 2 lite bots wasn't enough to have a good flow of different lite pricing bots, I had a "medium-high bulk bot" and a "medium-low bulk bot" meaning neither could be "too high", or more importantly, "too low", I was still buying basic lands for 0.005 or so in BestDeal4, and selling Timely Reinforcements for 0.02 on BestDeal3.

After creating my clan (BestDeal) I spent the next few weeks using the bots profits to build my new (and current) PC, Which would allow me to run a few more bots.

My next expansion happened in April 2012, This time I've gone from 4 bots up to 7 bots, 3 Pro and 4 Lite. This gave me a much needed flow in prices, allowing me to stretch my lite chain and getting bulk (such as basic lands) as low as 0.002 a piece and in higher quantities and having a third (BestDeal3) Pro bot, which would sell decent commons and uncommons fast enought before starting selling them on BestDeal4 for much lower prices. This made all my customers much happier and made them feel that there was no need to use other bots (unless i was out of stock in a specific card etc).


This week I've gone from 7 to 10 Bots. All it was required was some more Memory Ram (from 16gb to 24gb) and I think this machine can easily take 2 more. I am happy with the expansion and I hope this will mean more profits in the future.

Hows been your expansion story? anything you want to share with us? Please comment.