How to start your bot the right way Part 5

The key to successful business is to do your research.

Hi Everyone!

This time, I wanted to expand a little on how to buy a collection. Most people selling collections are very understanding and are happy to let you open a trade and browse their collection. Most people I spoke to don't know exactly how to maximize this opportunity.

I'll start with what I do. Because MTGO finance is an interesting topic to me, I have knowledge of card pricing and the recently experienced trends. I assume that as a bot owner (or potential bot owner) you're going to have the same level of commitment to following the prices. There are hundreds (literally) of tools online to help you track MTGO card prices. I go through and look for cards that are of value? When I say "of value" I usually look for standard rares that are over 1 ticket. Other formats, I look for cards over about $2. You won't know every single card is valuable, and neither do I and that's fine.

You will miss some cards but go through and add all the cards you're finding values up and get the total. If the total of these cards is the price of the collection, it's a great deal. I realize this is very subjective based on your knowledge, but it works well for me. The reason I find these to be great deals is that every single other card is free. There are many casual players who play pauper and commander and whatever other formats that I don't follow that will likely sell. If the collection is huge, do a check of how many cards are standard and modern legal because Legacy and Vintage aren't huge on MTGO (standard and modern commons and uncommons sell a lot faster than Legacy and Vintage).

I have heard that other people have similar methods or download the cards into a spreadsheet and enter prices, but my experience is that this is too time consuming to be worthwhile.

I used this technique and have never gotten a collection that was worth four times the purchase price once transferred into my bot.

Once I bought a collection for $500 and it was worth 3300 tickets in the MTGO library control panel. This is a real time accurate value, but it is unlikely to actually realize all of
the profit because many cards are worth a few cents but aren't desirable by anyone. Like unplayed Onslaught block commons, no one wants them and they move very slowly. If you get the right collection with many standard cards you'll realize a large percentage of your total value.