Sunday, September 1, 2013

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (MLBot Basics 3) Part 12

The Lite bot and you:
In the last article I described some basics of the ML Bot interface and settings. In this blogpost I'll talk about some simple, basic strategies for botting with ML Bot and how to get your first bot(s) running.

I'm planning on going a little more in-depth(but still very basic) into each basic bot type, Pro, Lite and "hybrid" and I'll start off with a post about the Lite bot, the most simple one. I'll explain the differences and how you can set one up with some simple, easy and safe settings to begin with. More advanced tactics and settings will be covered in the future. Just make sure to read and follow the advice I gave in the previous post before you start with these settings.

The Lite bot basics:
A Lite bot buys in bulk. It buys for a set price per rarity, for example: 500 Common, 200 Uncommon or 30 Rares for 1 ticket. These can be set to anything you feel like.
It's not buying strictly 500 commons, it could be for example 250 commons and 100 uncommon. These numbers are mainly to give an example. In the bot's settings you don't set it to buy 500 common, you set it to buy commons for 0.002 tickets each, which adds up to 500 commons per ticket.

It's a good idea to keep these numbers fairly clean, at least with commons and uncommons.
It's not as important when it comes to rares as these aren't sold as much in bulk as junk commons, and pricing is more crucial as it's easier to make the mistake of buying these too high which will make people fill your bot with junk-rares that you overpay for. 
It's best to start off buying rares at around 40/ticket and after you fill up with crap like Search The City and the like, you can decrease it to 30 or so to make people more tempted to sell them to you.

Lite bots are mainly used to fill a Pro bot with stock. You buy cheap cards for bulk prices and then fill your Pro bot so it always has at least 4 of each.
You can of course still use it to sell cards as well and it's a great way of getting rid of junk commons.
Sometimes people will sell valuable cards to your Lite bot(s) with cheap buying prices so make sure to transfer all valuable cards to a Pro or "hybrid" bot that will sell them for what they're worth.
This is easily done by making a deck-file or "wishlist" containing valuable cards to use when transferring valuables.
Lite bot settings:
Decide which sets you want to start buying.
When using a cheap Lite bot I'd say it's worth buying every set while a Pro bot is better off buying only standard in the beginning. Although this totally depends on how many tickets you can afford to spend to build a stock.
You can set this in the "Collection" tab by simply selecting the sets you want to buy and set the amount of each category you want to purchase.
I would recommend not buying Foils in the beginning, or only very cheaply, just very slightly above non-foil. The same goes for basic lands as long as you're not buying extremely low. I would also recommend only buying 4 of each card in the beginning or maybe 8 if you have a big stock of tickets, as you're better off with a large variety of cards than tons of the same one.

I would recommend settings along these lines:
   • Common buy: 0.002
   • Common sell: 0.005
   • Uncommon buy: 0.0555
   • Uncommon sell: 0.01
   • Rare buy: 0.025
   • Rare sell: 0.0333
   • Mythic buy: 0.03
   • Mythic sell: You don't really want to sell these on your Lite bot.


When you've set up your prices make sure to write a fitting classified message your bot will post that advertises your prices and then you're ready to go.

Next time I'll go through how you can set up your first Pro bot.

Cheers!
-Tom (Sitrec)
Archbot MTGO Store: ArchBot, ArchBot2, ArchBot3, ArchBot4 & ArchBot5

3 comments:

  1. I can think of one exception to the "don't want to sell mythics on bulk bots" rule - the single worst mythic to date, archangel's light.

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  2. i use 1 archagel's light maindeck on my epic experiment deck :P

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  3. Looks like you buy uncommons for more than you sell them, I hope you had the "Check price consistency" checked

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