Extended sell & buy price consistency

Yesterday we updated the server to handle the Sell (and Buy) price consistency "over" the maximum protection values of 100%. You can now choose 110% and 105% . What does this mean?

Setting a value higher than 100% (for example 105% or 110%) results in trades with a profit. Please note that if your protection percentage is set too high for too long you risk not selling the card, and therefore not re-buying it at the market value. This may result in a lower than normal inventory rotation and an overall loss in profits. Remember that some cards fall in price and if you don't keep up with the market you may be holding onto the card for too long.

For the original article about price consistency (introduced one year ago), please read here: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/04/price-consistency-feature.html
For the manual, please read here: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/11/control-panel-v4-buysell-consistencey.html

Special Buddies, online

We are proud to announce the new Special Buddies tool, available on the Online Control Panel. It works exactly as the one on the "client bot", but it is centralized and it is shared among your bots. The old tool on the client bot will not be supported anymore.

The new Special Buddy tool is not active yet: to ease the transition, it will be activated 3rd December. Before that date you need to migrate your special buddies online.

We hope you will enjoy the new tool. Having it online means that you can easily adjust the prices on your smartphone even when not in front of the pc!

When is the right time to buy Khans of Tarkir cards?

I am not going to repeat what I said a year ago, only tell you that the principles still apply.

Please reread my article from 2013: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/when-to-invest-in-fall-set-theros-for.html

Also notice how well the principles did apply to most Theros cards except for the ones that went into Standard decks that relied on RTR cards (such as Thassa, even though I think we might see her again).

Spoiler: The right time to invest for Standard purposes (rotation is almost always even better, but you don't want to wait until October 2016 to get your KTK goodies, do you?) is in December this year.

Khans cards will now - with a few exceptions - fall at a slow and steady pace until December.

Good luck!

Online Price Editor

Let's pretend you are away from home, with no laptop, without your Magic Online tools, and you realize there is something wrong with your pricing and need to fix quickly. For example this weekend ONS fetch lands dropped drastically due to the annoucement of them being reprinted in Khans and if you didn't change your price quickly you would have bought them all at around 30-40 even though they are selling for about 30 now.

Before today, you couldn't do anything. You could just sit there and watch your bots burn your tickets.

Today we launch the online price editor so you can adjust your prices in few seconds from anywhere and deliver the updates to your bots, immediately. The editor is specifically designed for smartphone and tables, so you can use wherever you are.
You can access the editor from the Online Control Panel, after login, clicking on "Personal Price List" and then "Create a personal price list" (the blue button).

MTGO Library Bot 6.96 - update your prices wherever you are

Market moves fast and you need to change a price immediately? Are you away from home and you realize that you set some wrong prices on the pricelist? That can really be a nightmare and I bet this happened everyone at least once.
If you have teamviewer you can fix this, but now, more easily, you can upload a pricelist in the format of "PersonalPrices.txt" directly from the Online Control Panel: the pricelist will be uploaded and automatically delivered to your bots in few minutes. You don't need to restart the bots, they will automatically recognize the update and use it.

Once uploaded, mtgolibrary.com server will send you an email to confirm the upload: just click on the link provided in the email. The price list page (image below) will show all the pricelists (confirmed and not confirmed) and, as soon as the bots update, their names will change from "gray" to "blue" - so you'll know which bots received the update and which still have to get it.

We designed the upload with a cloud approach so you can review the old pricelists and download them by clicking the name in the table ("Filename" column).
Everything should be pretty easy to use and self-explanatory but if you have any doubt please don't hesitate and write us at staff@mtgolibrary.com, or chat us on LiveChat or on Skype (we are "mtgolibrary.support").

WebShop APIs example usage

The following code snippet shows how to use the inventory api to populate a table of cards. It is a good starting point if you need to build you own views.

WebShop APIs 2.0

Last week we released the WebShop APIs (http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/05/introducing-webshop-apis.html) with the idea to ease the creation of webshops.You botters loved that and gave us many feedback, thank you :-), we did not expect such a warm welcome.

Yesterday we released "version 2.0" with the goal to simplify the usage. The most important API request, the Inventory one, has been rewritten and now contains plain card names and bot names instead of numerical identifiers. You don't need to build two tables to decode the correspondence with the real names.
The parameter of the request is no more "set_number" but directly the name of the set, for example THS or BNG.

The result is a Json text, for example:

<...>

{"card_name":Eidolon+of+Countless+Battles,"set_name":BNG,"rarity":R,"bot":xxx,"foil":1,"buy_price":0.726,"buy_quantity":3,"sell_price":1.26,"sell_quantity":0},{"card_name":Elite+Skirmisher,"set_name":BNG,"rarity":C,"bot":yyy,"foil":0,"buy_price":0.003,"buy_quantity":3,"sell_price":0.017,"sell_quantity":0},

<...>

Introducing WebShop APIs

Yesterday we released the first version of the WebShop APIs, an Application Programming Interface to connect your webshop online with the bots.

Using the APIs you will be able to populate your collection in real time and sell cards even out of Magic Online, on your website, exactly as mtgotraders.com or cardbot do. Many botters already do this using unconventional solutions, for example parsing the file "cardsneededandcollection.txt" or parsing the .csv of the collections. WebShop APIs help simplify this and offer a solid core to build your online presence.

APIs are simple http get requests and the result is a text file formatted in Json, so you can easily parse it with one the many libraries available online - or you can parse it as a standard text file.

Please feel free to experiment with the APIs. If you are not a programmer and want to build your webshop, please contact us and our staff will help you.

Introducing the Price Consistency Tool

Hello Botters,

today we take the market back and ban speculators and raiders out of our lives forever. We are introducing a new tool, Pricing Consistency.

Take a look at any card on mtggoldfish.com: compared to paper magic (right, blue line), mtgo prices (left, red line) go up and down suddenly in short amounts of time. In the example Ashiok crossed the value of 5.5 tixs 27 times in a month. This happens because the MTGO Market is lively and very efficient. Without any protection, you could easily buy Ashiok at its highest price and sell it at the lowest, all the opposite you want to do. You can price each card manually via PersonalPrices.txt, but this is really time consuming and simply you cannot do for every card.

The goal of the Price Consistency tool is to decrease the amount of sudden spikes of cards and increase the overall stability of the market. As you see in the first graph the red line represents the current market, the blue represents the market of the future. Price Consistency will help increase your overall profit.
So how does it work? There are two sides of the table, the buy price consistency and the sell price consistency.

Sell price consistency:
For each card, your bots will automatically adjust the selling price to minimize your loss for market fluctuations. For example, if you buy a card for 10 tix and the market drops in value so that you are now selling it for 9 tixs, you will lose 1 tix if you do not have selling protection.

The % dropdown menus defines the force of the price adjustments. You can have a time decay so that a card bought long time ago won't affect the selling price too much.
100% means: if necessary, calculate the new price to save you 100% of the loss. Using the example above, this will result in a selling price of 10 tixs.
80% means: if necessary, calculate the new price to save you 80% of the loss. Using the example above, this will result in a selling price of 9.8 tixs.
0% means: no protection, simply use the current selling price. Using the example above, this will result in a selling price of 9 tixs.

You have the option to override Personal prices. Please note that if your protection percentage is set too high for too long you risk not selling the card, and therefore not re-buying it at the market value. This may result in a lower than normal inventory rotation and an overall loss in profits. Remember that some cards fall in price and if you don't keep up with the market you may be holding onto the card for too long.

Buy price consistency: 

For each card, your bots will automatically adjust the buying price to minimize your loss for market fluctuations. For example, if you sell a card for 10 tix and the market rises in value so that you are now buying it for 11 tixs, you will lose 1 tix if you do not have buying protection.

The % dropdown menus defines the force of the price adjustments. You can have a time decay so that a card sold long time ago won't affect the buying price too much.
100% means: if necessary, calculate the new price to save you 100% of the loss. Using the example above, this will result in a buying price of 10 tixs.
80% means: if necessary, calculate the new price to save you 80% of the loss. Using the example above, this will result in a buying price of 10.2 tixs.
0% means:; no protection, simply use the current buying price. Using the example above, this will result in a buying price of 11 tixs.

Happy botting!

Jason - Teamstoge

MTGO Library Bot 6.83 - introducing "Profit Protection"

ML Bot 6.83 has just been released. There is nothing new here at a first sight, but it prepares the field for the "Profit Protection" tool we will introduce tomorrow!

Please stay tuned because this will be something big :-)

Cards I bought today

There are a lot of Flashback Drafts on Magic Online these days. Right now, today, you should be picking up your Odyssey Block cards. A block usually bottoms out the weekend AFTER the draft ends. Next weekend you should pick up your Time Spiral cards.

I have been using the principles from this article about what to buy at any given moment to create my list below: htttp://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2014/03/what-should-you-buy-at-any-given-moment.html

I have picked up the following cards over the weekend:

Black Sun's Zenith at 0,15 tix

Cabal Ritual 0,29 tix

Deep Analysis 0,15 tix

Earth Rift at 0,15 tix

Grand Abolisher at 0,17 

Nimble Mongoose at 0,43 tix

Necromancy at 0,28 tix

Prismatic Strands at 0,15 

Standstill at 1,48 tix

Submerge at 3,42 tix

Treachery at 2,5 tix

VI Fireblast at 0,55 tix

I have also picked up Ajani's Chosen at 0,06 tix and Mana Bloom at 0,05 tix but that is very speculative 

Hope you find this useful. If you have any finance tips you wish to share, please do so in the comments below.

Randomly, I also made a video about today's buying spree:

MTGO Library Bot 6.75 - revised make 4x tradable for large collections

Few days ago we released ML Bot 6.74 (article here: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2014/04/mtgo-library-bot-674-make-4x-tradable.html), able to mark your cards tradable to 4.
Today we release ML Bot 6.75, overcoming the problems 6.74 had with large collections (collections with more than 2500 unique items).

Please note that:

• ML Bot will mark all your cards tradable to a certain amount 'X', where 'X' can be 1,2,3,4,10,32. If you have more than 2500 different items, due to the MTGO limits in handling the collections, you first need to mark all your cards tradable to 'X' manually, by yourself, and then ML Bot will adjust the selection, trade after trade. If you don't mark your cards tradable to 'X' before and you have a collection with more than 2500 different items, ML Bot won't able to perform the task.

• If you are using the 'Balance' Autotransfer mode you may want to switch to 'Refill' since Balance mode moves the cards using the quantity for trade (and here the donor bot hides some cards). The other autotransfer modes work as intented

• Tixs are automatically made all tradable

MTGO Library Bot 6.74 - make 4x tradable

As promised few days ago, we released today ML Bot 6.74, introducing a much-awaited feature, the "make 4x tradable" option. The new option is available on the General Tab of the bot GUI.

So far, you could only choose to "make all your cards tradable" at the end of the trade, but this looks unprofessional to customers especially when your collection is not balanced and you have, for instance, 10x of a card on a bot and 1x on another. Now you can choose to make "4x tradable" (or 1x, 2x, 10x, 32x) and cards in excess will be hidden. All your tixs will be still all tradable, they won't be capped to 4x.
Talking with a botter some weeks ago, he told me that the psychological on customers is huge: they say 19x tradable and don't buy - they say 4x and buy.

Technically speaking, the bot performs the required actions between trades after 20 seconds of  inactivity from customers. This is an empirical rule to assess that the bot is not busy trading repeatedly with a customer. Please note that this behaviour is slightly different from the old "make all tradable" that was performed at the end of each trade.

**UPDATE: if you have a large collection, Mtgo will limit to 2500 different cards the "make all tradable option". If you are experiencing this limit, just wait tomorrow and we will release a workaround **

4x... coming soon

We are excited to announce that we are working on a new feature that will be available this week... something that will definitely boost the way your bot(s) are perceived from customers....

More to come.

MTGO Library Bot 6.46 - Oversell protection

ML Bot 6.46 is a major release, offering a numer of small bug fixes and bringing a new tool, the Oversell Protection.

What is it? The oversell protection is a set of rules that apply to customers that buy more than "x" copies of a certain card in a 24 hour period. While not everybody needs it, it can be useful to protect your bots from someone buying all the copies of a certain card (for example to speculate on it). A user buying all the copies of a card is not necessarily a bad thing, but if you want an always stocked chain this could be annoying, especially when the prices of the cards move fast (such as during the Release Events).

You can active the tool in the Online Control, clicking on the "Oversell Protection" button. There are several things you can do there: you can decide how to respond to an oversell attempt: you can deny the trade or you can increase the price of the card. You can do this for rarity and foilness, and choose the thresholds of cards and the increase in price.

The interface is easy use, but we are still working on it and will make it better. So far the oversell protections apply to all your bots - we plan to make it chain-wide and all-bots-wide to offer a deeper control.

As final note, with ML Bot 6.46 we changed the executable packer to decrease the size of the files. This is ok, save for AVG Free that detects the new executable ("LauncherGUI.exe") as a generic virus. We are still working on the issue and try to find out why. Other antivir are fine and do not raise any alarm, we think that AVG is tuned to detect a higher number of false positives than other antivir.

Note for the beta testers: this release, 6.46, is NOT the 6.46 you are using, it is slighly less. Your version already has the oversell protection.

.

MTGO Weekly Finance Tips

Just started a series on YouTube that I will do every Monday with a couple of Finance tips. I do a segment on the podcast Pauper to the People and I will do the YouTube video right Before that segment, so they will overlap.

This is the first episode:

Basically, I am doing four different specs right now.

1. Buy Pauper. Extremely high risk. Flashback drafts and the loss of Daily Events have hurt the Pauper staples (Always very unstable) a lot. Some cards have dropped 90% or more (Snuff Out for example). If you want to do a high risk adventure speculation, invest in Pauper staples. Returns of 800-1000% in a year is not unthinkable. Only for the brave.

2. Buy Modern staples. Just five months to the first Modern PTQ season since early 2013. Prices will soar and some cards (especially MMA that was recently drafted) are still low. Pretty solid returns.

3. Sell Standard. Even Theros cards (but especially RTR Block and M14) should spike soon. When the Standard PTQ Season in Paper ends on March 9th, the stuff that will rotate this fall will start falling.

4. Buy Penny rares. I have a special place in my heart for Penny Rare speculation. I just sold 213 Nightveil Specters and now I am trying to get rid of 200 High Priest of Penance. If one Penny Rare hits, it pays off for a lot of them that did not hit. Speculating on Penny Rares brought me into Contact with Daniel who managed to summarize a lot of thoughts about Theros Penny Rares (below)


P.s. I am also buying M14 Mythics, but that is the subject for a whole other article. D.s.


My friend Daniel on the Theros Penny Rares (in response to my own thoughts on the subject):

Okay, so here is my line of thinking on the cards I'm targeting from THS right now..

Rageblood Shaman - I believe the block is bound to produce some more Minotaurs; I think that's a given. We already have Rageblood, Reckoner and Fanatic of Mogis, which makes for a decent good core. This spec may be predicated on a good 1-drop Minotaur but I also think an above-average Midrange piece could cause a spike as well. There's very little risk here at .02-.05 and a decently high ceiling.

Reverent Hunter - I've had some experience against mono green devotion and think it can be a very real deck. Whenever I see this guy hit the board, he's a 5/5 for 2G. Also working to its advantage is that he scales so he isn't a specifically bad late game draw. Casting cost is nice, typing is nice (human) and the current price is nice at .04-.06. I'm in.

Arbor Colossus - 6/6 for 5CMC, can grow and has a relevant ability (walls/shoots down cloudfin, nightveil, stormbreath and etc.). Good card overall but I'm looking to grab it for under .1 if possible.

Those are the main ones I'm looking at right now. As for mythics, I grabbed two playsets of Underworld Cerberus for .64 because I think at least one of his abilities will be very relevant in the upcoming meta. It doesn't have a ETB trigger, which is a big deal of course but the super evasion plus dissuading hard
removal seems very good.

To a lesser extent I like Prognostic Sphinx (has some appeal if control mirrors become a thing IMO), Nighthowler (is a better Reverent Hunter if GY shenanigans take off), Prophet of Kruphix (would be buying if it were .05 cheap; on the fence), Daxos of Meletis (have play tested and my opponent ALWAYS targets him first; I think it means something), Reaper of Wilds (I'd be happier here if it were cheaper and the Golgari Scryland was being released in BNG), Polis Crusher (efficient body:cost, hope ability becomes a little more relevant) and Ember Swallower (see Crusher although it's alarming that red devo hasn't made any use of him).

 

Oh, by the way, here are the exact numbers on the mana intensive 3CMC lords..
 
Knight Exemplar - high of 1.5 

Field Marshal - 1.6

Merfolk Sovereign - .13

Grand Architect - 1.4

Goblin King - N/A

Goblin General- 1.4

Balthor the Stout - .19

Elvish Champion - 2.5

Elvish Archdruid - 1.2

Lord of the Undead- 4

Death Baron - .88

Cemetery Reaper -.95

Captivating Vampire - .9

* for cards with multiple reprints, I took the high of their first Printing.

Proft Stats for single bot, chain and all bots

Recently we introduced the Stats Block and the Profit Graph.  http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2013/12/profit-number-and-value-of-trades.html

We have now enhanced them to include the data from all your bots and from the bots in the same sharing credit chain. By default the Dashboard shows the data for "all" bots. Just click on the links on the right (orange arrows) to navigate the other datasets.

The "single bot" is the bot you are logged in with. You can change that bot using the dropdown menu on the left.  "All bots" refers simply to all your bots, without any distinction, while "chain" is the set of bots sharing credits with the current bot (as definied in the "Sharing Credit" Panel)

Profit, number and value of trades

Yesterday we introduced a tool on the Online Control Panel showing the profit, the number and the value of the trades grouped by day, week and month.
Data starts from 1st November and will never be erased. The idea is go to get a clear understanding of how the bot is performing (and possibly tune it).

We'll work on the data during the next weeks, so this is the time to request adjustements / new features !

Trade Duration in Trade Log

Starting right after the downtime, all the ML Bot 6.20 and 6.21 users will be able to view trade duration in the Trade Log.
The feature has been requested for a long time and it's finally there! Now you'll be able to see who keeps your bot always buys :-)
Withdraw are timed as well.

When to sell a Magic online card

Hey! I bought 26 pack rats at 0.05 cents and a couple of weeks back they were suddenly one dollar due to the Mono Black Devotion deck! High score! Right?

I sold most of my Pack Rats. To humans, to avoid the bot rake.

Then Pack Rat Went up to two dollars. I bought some at 1.20, sold them for close to 2. Brought out my playset and listed them at two as well.

Then Pack Rat crashed back down to about one ticket again.

So in the end I sold most of my stock at one dollar when I could have received two tix each for them.

Most speculators, bot owners and MTGO finance buffs know (or at least think they know) when it is time to buy (HINT: Buy Theros in mid-december when the fall set is traditionally at its lowest price during its Standard life cycle). But when is it time to sell? That is a very hard question to answer.

If you never sell, you never make any profit
It is so easy to just sit there and Watch your cards rise in value and wait for just a couple of percent more. But leave the last 10% to the other guy. Get out while you can. Bring home the bacon! If you never sell, you never win.

Some good rules to keep in mind when you are selling cards on Magic Online

# Sell when demand is at its highest. Sell Standard cards in february when the Winter set has just come out and Standard PTQ season is going on. Sell Modern cards in July when the Modern PTQ season is in full swing.

# Do not sell at the bottom. Have patience.

# Set a price where you sell no matter what in advance. If you speculated on a penny rare, maybe you want 10 times the Money when you sell. Then sell at 50 cents, even if the card is still rising. Take the profit! I usually sell when I get 200% profit, except for penny rares. 200% in under a year is my magic number. I am surprised at how often I get that.

# Sell before rotation. Long before rotation. Rotation is what costs people money on Magic Online. Do not be the guy that got rid of Thragtusk for 3 tickets. Be the guy that got rid of Thragtusk for 13 tickets when demand was still high. This is probably the single most important thing you can do for your MTGO budget. Be aware that you are paying a steep price for playing the old block rares and mythics in Standard during the summer. Actually, if you care at all about your Magic budget, be aware that you probably pay a very steep price for playing Standard at all, but that is another story.

Also, Always remember the most important thing! http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/10/the-most-important-thing_23.html

My contact information
Twitter: @MagicGathstrat, youtube.com/magicgatheringstrat, magicgatheringstrat.facebook.com and mtgostrat.com