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

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 !

Psychological pricing vs Float Pricing

What is Psychological Pricing?

Psychological pricing or price ending or charm pricing is a marketing practice based on the theory that certain prices have a psychological impact. The retail prices are often expressed as "odd prices": a little less than a round number, e.g. $19.99 or £2.98. Consumers tend to perceive “odd prices” as being significantly lower than they actually are, tending to round to the next lowest monetary unit. Thus, prices such as $1.99 is associated with spending $1 rather than $2. The theory that drives this is that lower pricing such as this institutes greater demand than if consumers were perfectly rational. Psychological pricing is one cause of price points. (Source)

This Pricing does not only gives the false idea that something is cheaper than normal but also means your will be undercutting competition that are selling a Magic Online card for the "same" (0.01 more) price. This also means that your bot will be listed first on wikiprice when sorting by price and so on.

(Example of Psycological pricing on a well known bot chain, Buy on left, Sell on right.)

This sounds like a straight foward better option when it comes to pricing cards, but there are many situations where "float pricing" can be used in your advantage; Specially on Magic Online.

Float Pricing

Float pricing is a pricing method that takes advantage of the credit system in Magic the Gathering:Online. Pricing a card at 15.01 will benefit a regular customer with saved credit (against a newcomer) as they are likely to be able to take the card for just 15 Event Tickets (plus 1 cent credit). The main advantage of this are the extra sales you will make with this technique with new customers and the reduced amount of "raiding" trades. The same can be done to buying prices (ending on .99).

The way this method helps against raiding is quite simple. If a card is worth between $11.75 and 12.25 and you have it priced at 11, the chances are that you will sell it very quickly to a non regular customer for 11 that will never come back. Having that card at 11.01 means that you will either sell it to a regular customer for 11 Event tickets (while a raider with no saved credits wouldn't take it); or, with a bit of luck, will result in a trade like the one I had bellow last month. 

(on this example you can see one of the big advantages of the float pricing method)

While the trade above was happening I was lucky enough to watch the whole process. The Customer started by picking up the Polukranos, World Eater card, which I had manually priced at 11.01 Event Tickets.

on this specific day that card value spiked up to over 13 Event Tickets

 The Customer had no credits so the bot quoted 45 tix (saving 0.96 credit). If the card was priced at 11.00 the trade would be over within seconds and this person would probably never use my bots again unless he found another great deal in the future.

What happened was completely the opposite to the typical "raiding trade", the customer after a minute or two, started picking other cards trying to round things up to 45.0 so he wouldn't leave 0.96 credit. All the other cards he needed were worth between $2 and $5, meaning that the end result would never be near the 45.0 mark.

On the end this Customer ended up picking up all his needs from my bot resulting in a overall small profit (even though the Polukranos, World Eater were sold quite under the fair price). 

Needless to say that all the other bots that sold the card via "psychological pricing" at 10.99 and even at 11.99 on that day, made a worse deal than me selling this whole package.

This person is now a regular happy Customer... :D

Please comment or share your success stories!

Time to look at your Collection History

Three days have passed since when we put online the new algorithm to evaluate the collections. The reason for a new algorithm was that the old one was bugged and didn't provide reliable results.
(see article: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.com/2013/11/found-and-fixed-bug-in-collection.html)

We checked some random bots these days, and everything so far seems fine. Still, everyone should now check the Collection History, selecting the "single bot" option from the checkboxes (see image). If you see uncorrect results, such as number of items different from the ones in collection, please write us at staff@mtgolibrary.com.

429 error on Wikiprice

If you see this error on wikiprice,

don't worry, it's ok.
We coded the messages because someone was abusing wikiprice and bombing the server with multiple request at a time. If you see the messages, don't worry, just reload the pages in 15 seconds and everything will be fine!

Remote Control of the ML Bot

We host a series of articles from our friends blog http://www.mtgeconomist.com , a blog dealing with mtg and mtgo economics.

You can read the original article here: 

http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/mtgo-library-control-remoto-del-bot-parte-6-3/


Previously we took a look at all the settings of the bot. The main problem is that you have to be in front of the computer which is running the bot in order to make any changes in their behavior. To solve it, in this article I will explain how to view the status of your robot, statistics from sales/purchases and even how to make a remote control of the bot.

Control panel on the web

MTGO Library provides an additional service to the software that controls our digital cards store. This control panel can be accessed through our session on the bot website. Upon entering, you will see a page like the capture below.

This section is the “Dashboard” or main desktop where you can access to all available information remotely. As you can see there are 3 different areas:

• Top menu: Access to all bot updates and its price list, as well as the renewal of the licenses (Lite and Pro). 
• Side menu: Mainly displays performance statistics of the bot, however you can also make some changes from here. These options will be discussed in a future chapter because it is more related to strategies when creating your own chain of bots. 
• Main section: Here it is shown the corresponding section selected from one of the previously commented menus. 

Within the left side menu options, firstly there is a series of display options with both, bot information and statistical data:

• Dashboard: Displays a screen capture with the operating system of the bot. Below it is a bar with connection status of that computer. On the right side you can see a summary of the following information from bot: bot status (online/offline and if it is with a customer); status of the Magic Online client (online/offline); 
• Transaction fee or commission due to the bot transactions; date and type of the last transaction; license type (Free/Lite/Pro) and expiration date; and the total value of the collection managed by the bot.
• Trades log: on ​​top of this page there are diagrams with the latest sales statistics representing the total value of trades, number of trades of the most frequent customers, percentage of buyings against sales… Afterwards, there is an advanced search engine transaction, and below there is a list of the transactions for the last 24 hours. In the summary of each transaction you can see its mode (buy/sell/trade), total value, customer name and its date. If you want to see the details, you just have to click on the bar of the transaction to see the following information: 
• List of cards exchanged with their individual price 
• Total value and the value without the customer accumulated credit 
• Tickets received 
• Previous and current customer credits 
• Tickets available on the store after this transaction 
• Fee generated by this transaction 
• Total fees after this transaction (debit to MTGO Library) 
• Links to screenshots generated just when the bot confirms the transaction

• Cards Log: This section is very useful when you want to track the benefits of a specific card. After searching a card, this section shows all its buys and sales with their values attached. The site also summarizes the profit or loss made by this card. Thus, by using this information you can decide, for example, to change the prices of a particular card. 
• Collection History: Summary of the total value of your collection divided by rarity. It is updated every 24/48 hours and, although it is useful to get an idea of ​the value for your stock, often these data are not very accurate. For example, there are some days that I have had almost no sales and my collection changed its value around +-200 tickets. 
• Transaction Fee: List with each renting fee generated and deducted by one of the official MTGO Library accounts. These accounts remove fees by taking tickets from your store every time its the renting fee exceeds the value of 1 ticket. 
• Multimonitor: Current screenshot from each of your bots. It also shows their online status and the commission generated by each one independently. Remember that for every bot you have to pay the fees generated by their respective transactions.

Below these statistics options there are some sections which modify the data the bot works with:

• Credits: Displays the available credits for each client who has done transactions in your store. Each customer on the list offers an option to show all his transactions, as well as the possibility to edit their credits for any reason. 
• Messages: Allows you to change the text of the advertisement shown in the “classifieds” section on Magic Online. This option is very useful if you want to remotely change your advertising. Changes are made every hour, so it may take you a bit to see the update of your advertisement. 
• Sharing Credits: If you have more than one bot, from here you can make to share the credit between themselves. This means that a customer will have available the same credits in your entire chain of bots. 
• Blacklist: Finally, your session on MTGO Library website allows you to add users to a blacklist. Thus, a client on the blacklist cannot trade cards with your bots. You must be very sure to add someone here, and you should only do this if that customer has persistently abused from your stores. This explanation covers all the options you can handle from MTGO Library site to control your stores without being in front of the computer which runs the bots.

How to make a remote access to your bot

As you can see, although the control panel of MTGO Library website has many functions, it may happen that you wish to directly manage any of your bots for pausing, restarting, changing the custom price of a card… There are many methods to solve this problem, however I will explain in detail the one I use: LogMeIn.

Why I use this service? There are many reasons, but the most important are:

• Its basic version is offered for free 
• Very fast and easy-to-use interface 
• Easily manages a lot of computers from a single place. It may be used from different platforms (PC Windows, Mac, iPhone and iPad) 

The last point is very important for me, as it allows the remote control of the bot from your phone when you are far from home (obviously you should have an internet connection).
The steps to start using LogMeIn on the computer you install your bot are the following:

1. Create an account at LogMeIn
2. Login to your account on their website and, from the “Home” section, select “add computer” 
3. Download their application (Free version) and install it on the computer which runs the bot. It will ask you the computer name and if you use a proxy for your connection. 
4. That’s it! In order to use the remote control of your bot, go again to your “Home” section and you will see your computer on the list. Click over it and type the username and password of the user of that computer. 

Conclusions

With these tools you have a complete remote control system for your bot, so you can manage its behavior at any time. This feature is very important because sometimes you have to fix prices of cards, pause the bot, perform maintenance tasks, know the sales/purchases of your store…

The next chapter of this series will show you some of the most common strategies to create your own chain of bots.

Your store on Magic Online

We host the first of a series of articles from our friends blog http://www.mtgeconomist.com , a top blog dealing with mtg and mtgo economics.
You can read the original article here: 
http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/tu-tienda-en-magic-online-parte-5/



In the previous chapter I showed the three main profiles for the Magic Online users: the drafters, constructed players and collectors. Besides, I finished saying that all profiles had a common goal: trading cards for a profit without effort. This process can be achieved by creating a Magic Online store, which can be managed personally or by a bot, a tireless worker which makes trades at any time of the day.

What is a Magic Online store?

A Magic Online store can be as simple as a user which offers buying and selling cards. Unlike the official store, you may open a store at Magic Online to trade your own cards and get your profit. Any user can create a store but it should have at least the following elements:

• A Magic Online account
• A card stock and/or sealed product
• An ad on the classifieds section
• Time and a dedicated computer

The first requirement has no discussion. The second one is essential if you want to attract customers interested in your cards. The third one is needed if you want visibility and let people know that you offer cards for buy/sell. Finally, the computer seems obvious but in following chapters of this seres you’ll notice that this element requires an special attention.

The main advantage of having a store at Magic Online is that you can make a profit from every transaction. Each time you buy a card to the purchase price and then sell it to its selling you get a profit percentage. If you repeat this process you can go on infinite profit. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

You may ask yourself why people would sell you a card at a cheaper price that you could sell it. The main reason is because you are offering a service: to be continuously present at Magic Online and accumulate a stock that you offer to the public.

However, there is another even more important reason. Drafters open boosters with cards that they usually don’t want because they prefer to play another draft, so they try to sell them as soon as possible. You, as a store at Magic Online, buy them those cards at a lower price because you know they have the urge to sell. On the other hand, constructed players search cards for their decks, so you can sell them at a slightly higher rate than you bought because you are saving them time to search those cards.

This way, the loop of buy/sell a card is closed and now you know where the profit comes from. However, there are still some problems we have to solve. Let’s see how.

The problem of payments

The first problem that appears when you open a store at Magic Online is how to charge your customers. As I said in a previous article, the currency of the game is the Event Ticket. However, this coin is indivisible, so you could not buy a card with a value, for example, of 0.4 tickets. Therefore it is necessary to track the credit of each client. Thus, if you sell a card of 0.4 tickets to a customer, he would give you 1 ticket and you should record him 0.6 credits for future trades.

The second big problem relies on the necessity to be in front of your computer at all times if you want to get customers. As you can imagine, this would be a huge amount of work for only one person who owns a store at Magic Online. This way, it is not strange that your store is not directly managed by you, but by a bot.

What is a bot?

A bot is a sophisticated special software that manages all purchases and sales of your store at Magic Online. You may think of it as a tireless shopkeeper which replaces you when doing all the tasks required by your store, works 2
4 hours a day and asks you nothing in return. To give you an idea, I introduce you a list of tasks managed by a bot:

• Continuous update of your inventory status, after each buy/sell or whenever you personally change your inventory.
• Track credit of each customer.
• Check the status of the Magic Online client.
• Automatic update of your ad with latest prices, state of the bot (open/busy)
• Notify customers the prices of the cards selected by them for purchase.
• Refresh the price list of all cards on your store inventory.

Although you can add more tasks, the previous list summarizes the most relevant ones. For many of them, the robot needs to move the mouse, send clicks and keyboard commands. For this reason, an operating system that uses a robot should not be used for any other task and must be only running your store at Magic Online. Fortunately, this problem has a solution that will be discuss in a future article of this series.

Which bot should I use?

Although there are some bots for Magic Online over the net, undoubtedly the most famous is MTGO Library. This software has the advantage of allowing you to customize almost any behavior you want for your store at Magic Online. Therefore, I would suggest you this software as the best choice to start with your first store. In the next chapter I will explain how this application works and what chances you have to create your store on Magic Online.

Force of Will - not the card one!

I would love to say that I am a navigated businessman who found the secret of growing a company :-) Of course this is not true, but yet I find a common pattern on the successful companies and how their CEOs manage them.

in two words: "Force of Will" (not the card!)

You have to be smart, brilliant, passionate.. but if you lack the capacity to "stay at it", to hold on, to work hard in the tough periods... you won't succeed. Running a business is not a sprint, 

it's a marathon. 

Albert
staff@mtgolibrary.com

Magic Online Profiles

We host the first of a series of articles from our friends blog http://www.mtgeconomist.com , a top blog dealing with mtg and mtgo economics.
You can read the original article here: 
http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/perfiles-en-magic-online-parte-4



Magic is a game that allows you to have different experiences depending on the priorities of each player. Some people like to make their decks from a random card pool whereas others prefer to select the cards in his deck. There are also casual players whose main goal is collecting. In this chapter of the series I will introduce the importance of the profiles on Magic Online to have a strategy that will minimize your expenses in cards.

Firstly I will discuss what these profiles on Magic Online are about. Then I will advance how you can get benefits regardless of what sort of Magic player you are.

Limited Players

These players are often specialized in drafts so they are so-called drafters. Magic Online launches 8-player drafts queues constantly of the latest sets. Occasionally, older expansions are also added to the drafts queues. There are three main different queues, which differ in the prizes you get and the number of matches you can play:

• Swiss: You play three games by Swiss system, always against opponents with the same victories as you. You win a booster for each win at the end of the draft.
• 4-3-2-2: Elimination system where you leave the draft if you lose a match. The first qualified wins 4 boosters, the second 3 and both third-fourth win 2 boosters each.
• 8-4: Like 4-3-2-2 except for prizes. The winner wins 8 boosters and the second 4 boosters.

Normally, the boosters won are from sets of the draft you play. A draft usually costs 2 tickets plus product (the boosters you open in the draft), or 14 tickets. In the prereleases the price usually raises up to 20 tickets (it is not possible to buy product in this mode). Although you can buy directly from the store of Magic Online, it is usually better to exchange them for tickets on the secondary market because they are cheaper.

A drafter wants to fund their drafts with prizes of previous drafts so they are for free (infinite mode). To do this, the best method is 8-4 which gives you three boosters and another one for the tickets required to play another draft. Of course, you should have to always reach the finals, to be a very good player, to perfectly know the sets and have much luck drawing.

If you like the draft, my suggestion is to start with Swiss for better knowing the cards and play some matches (low risk). When you feel you have learnt the set it is time to change to 4-3-2-2 (medium risk), and if you see you win consistently and have became a master of that draft sets, then move to the 8-4 (high risk). Note that the top players are 8-4 so winning matches here will be quite harder.

Also, you have to consider that you keep the cards you use to create your deck. Thus, you can sell them after the draft and get some extra tickets that makes easier for you to play on infinite mode. Unless it is a very expensive card, I recommend you draw cards to improve your deck before a card with a value of 1 ticket or so that you will not be able to use on your matches (it is better to win a match rather than a ticket, isn’t it?).

Magic Online has recently added the Phantom sealed queues (you build a deck with the cards opened from 6 boosters). The difference with the normal mode is that you do not keep with the cards. The price is much more affordable (4 tickets) and prizes are not bad: winner (3 matches) gets 3 boosters and if you win 2 matches you keep one booster. However, as you do not keep the cards you play this extra value of drafts are lost.

Drafter strategy: use the rewards to keep playing and as profit. Sell ​​drafted cards to exchange for tickets and/or boosters.

Constructed Player

Constructed player prefers to create a deck built with legal cards of a particular format (Standard, Modern, Legacy …). For this purpose, firstly it is required to make an initial investment in order to buy the cards of the deck. Then, this deck can be used on different tournaments as long as you like. The only extra payment for joining tournaments is the registration tickets. There are two main possible constructed tournaments:

• Constructed Queues: For 2 and 8 players, they are 2 and 6 tickets respectively. The first one prize is a booster for the winner. In the second one prizes are distributed as 5-3-2-2.
• Scheduled Events: Usually for 16-256 players with a cost of 6 tickets. It consists of four rounds on Swiss mode, and prizes are 11 boosters if you win 4 games and 6 boosters if you win 3 games.

Constructed player usually play on scheduled events rather than queued events because prizes are quite better for the same entry option. You can firstly play on the Tournament Practice section of Magic Online for training against other players.

Constructed strategy: buy the cards for the deck at the best price possible. Earn as much as possible to amortize the deck or as profit. When changing the deck, sell old cards to the maximum value to minimize losses.

Collectors

There is also a third type of casual player who does not devote much time to the game. However, he likes to have all the cards in order to get any deck or simply because he wants to keep. The goal of this player is to get all the cards of the desired collections and redeem them if he prefers to have them physically.

Collectors are probably those who invest more money in the game. Thus, they need more than anyone to find a way to get the letters with the lowest price. Magic Online offers a fast way to make trading, buying and selling the cards on your collection. The market usually puts a buy price of a card around 10-15% lower than its sell price for highest rarities, and up to 50% difference in the most common ones.

A collector can be a real merchant and go make profit from each transaction. For this purpose he needs two things: a lot of time in front of the computer and an initial investment to start making trades.

Collectors Strategy: get the cards at their buying price and sell quickly to their selling price, gaining profit. Buy the cards in your collection with this benefit.

How to trade cards and get profit without loosing time and with no effort

 All the three profiles of players at Magic Online have this common goal. Drafters want to sell their cards quickly and keep playing. Constructed players want to buy or sell their cards at a good price. Collectors do not want to be waiting in front of their computer waiting for the bid of another player.

The solution? Using a robot software (so-called bot) to work for you day and night getting the benefits of buying and selling cards on Magic Online. In the next chapter of the series I will explain what this wonderful software is about, how it changes the strategy of each player profile and will give you some details on the application that I will use for this purpose.

Magic Online Economy: Fundamentals

We host the first of a series of articles from our friends blog http://www.mtgeconomist.com , a top blog dealing with mtg and mtgo economics.
You can read the original article here: 
http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/economia-de-magic-online-parte-3/

In this article I will talk you about the fundamentals of the Magic Online economy. With this information you will have an idea of ​​how to perform your purchases/sales of cards and the reasons that justify the price of a card. This comparison will not only be related to digital cards, but also between the value of an online and a physical card.

The main currency on Magic Online economy

Certainly there is no official currency on Magic Online. Since the beginning of the game the material was bought from the Magic Online official store, which can be accessed within the game itself. The only options available for sale are: boosters, pre-constructed decks and Event Tickets. These tickets allow you to enter at Magic Online tournaments where you can win prizes, and each of these items costs $1 plus taxes.

Due to the price of the tickets and their intrinsic value, soon people started to use them as the main currency. Their market price depends on factors such as the amount available on Magic Online, the number of drafts/limited queues to be launched, and recently also the high value of the mythic cards. Today their market price is slightly higher than $1 each, and it is unlikely to rise much more because if their value is very close to the official price ($1 + VAT) people would directly buy them from the store.

The evolution of prices

A particular feature of the Magic Online economy is that the price of each card evolves very fast. The reason is that the trades of cards can be done immediately without shipment delays, something that cannot be avoided on the physical market.

For this reason, the digital market behaves much more likely the real stock markets, and price changes are motivated by reasons like fear or speculation. However, in the Magic Online economy itself predictions can be made without being a financial guru. The important thing is that you must have a lot of experience in the game and know the cards, so you can correctly analyze the new sets and their possible interactions with the old cards in different game formats. In this way, you can overtake the market and buy a card that will be probably played (and, therefore, will rise in price) cheaper.

Giving a value to a Magic Online card

You might think that digital cards should have almost no value at all. After all, it is something that you can not own physically. In fact, your collection is not even stored on your own computer, but on a remote server managed by Wizards. However, if you look at the price of the cards at Magic Online, you can see that their value is not so different from the printed version. Normally, the digital market value is lower but sometimes happens exactly the opposite.

Why does this happen? Like I stated for the physical market, the value of the cards depends on many factors. Some of them are the same in both the virtual and real world, but others are specific to the Magic Online economy. Moreover, the effect of each factor is usually much larger in
the digital version because the changes happens instantly. Below I summarize some of them:

• Tournaments and prices: like the physical format, when a major tournament is announced for a certain format, the cards increase their price and then they stabilize again after that tournament finishes. Besides, when there are announces of drafts for a certain set the prices also get lower in anticipation of higher stock and less demand. And so on… 
• Reprints: Due to high speculation and the fast changes at Magic Online economy, the announcement of a reprint for a card makes its price collapse, especially if the card has a high economic value.
• Banning/Restriction: When a card is forbidden for using on certain constructed formats, its price usually gets lower because noone is able to play with it.
• Rarity: Although this is not a general rule, the rarest cards usually are more expensive and their foil version also have a higher value than normal ones.

These factors are may apply to both, the physical and digital market of Magic. However, there is another factor that, togeteher with the tournaments one, may have the highest impact on Magic Online economy: the redemption option.

What is redemption and why is it so important?

The redemption is an option offered on Magic Online to link the virtual world with the physical one, from both the ownership of the cards and their economic value point of view. Redemption consists of ordering a full set of physical cards to your home, only if you own all the cards of that set on your Magic Online account. You must have one copy of every card and they cannot be replaced by a foil nor another set version.

This option was introduced since the beginning of Magic Online to give extra value to the digital cards. Although nowadays the impact of this option on the Magic Online economy is smaller, it yet has a considerable weight.

The main advantage of this option is that you can buy digital cards in Magic Online at lower prices than the same printed cards. Likewise, you only apply the shipping costs once for receiving the cards in your house. Thus, it may be a very profitable option for collectors or even if you just want some very expensive cards of a specific set.

The main problem of redemption is that the big sellers flood the market with a huge amount of collections, lowering the price of both redeemed sets and those collected by opening boosters. For this reason, Wizards has recently increased the price of each collection requested the $5 to $25 (shipping not included). Although it is still an affordable price to individuals who wish from 1-4 sets, this new value limits the benefits obtained by directly selling the redeemed collections.

In my opinion, the redemption is one of the best options offered on Magic Online, and is also an excellent regulator of the economy. I could write a whole article dedicated to this topic, but I think I have offered you the basic information to know the fundamentals of Magic Online economy and how redemption works. In the next chapter I will discuss the profiles of players you can find on Magic Online. This analysis will aid you to better understand the market movements of digital cards.

Welcome to botrunners.net

www.botrunners.net is a friend forum mainly focused on business and on ML Bot. The forum launched one week ago, it's still pretty new but promizing: let's make it grow! Bot users in fact do not have a dedicated place to discuss, to know each other and possibly have business together.

I strongly think it will be wonderful to have a place where you can post suggestions, ask for advices, post your "hey, I sell tixs" advertisement and this kind of things. The official WotC forums are so moderated that you cannot even talk about bot, business and tixs - we bot owners deserve more.

Visit it daily, write there something - at first it will be boring because you will be "alone" but in 1-2 months the ML Bot user and business men will have a new powerful tool strapped on their
belt.

BestDeal Clan

In 20 months of running the BestDeal Clan we have now won a total of over 200.000 packs in MTGO Events. This is a big achievement which reward us the 4th place on top5 Clans. We are currently aiming to reach the third place within 2 months and second place within 6 months.

How did you get there? Aren't clans useless in MTGO?
The MTGO Client itself does not offer many "clan features" apart from a channel where we can all chat. In the recent days, a new member of the clan has been helping me improve the community feeling of the clan; we have now a ventrilo and soon will have a more complete website (with forums, videos, streams, etc) rather than just the BestDeal's store.
In terms of business we offer a few "services" to clan members. We will match any better offer from other bot (higher buying price or lower selling price), so our members don't require to spread credits all over the competition, we offer clan discounts on the BestDeal's store and plenty of advice to new drafters on how to maximize profits or minimize losses while playing competitively.

A considerate portion of my bots Customers are clan members and that's one of the many reasons for my success. Do you have any of yours to share?

A great story

Two days ago I talked to a customer of mine. It was the first time I had a conversation with him. This person run 4 bots.

I cannot tell you the name and give you the exact numbers, but the substance does not change.
He shared with me his financial spreadsheets, with monthly reports. He started one year ago and he does incredibly well. With just 4 bots he is able to extract a net profit of more than 750 usd/month, real money, in his bank account.
While this person is not the most profitable one (he is half way up the ladder), he just run 4 bots compared to the usual 15-20 of top botters. As time passes, he will add bots and he will surely become of the biggest chain.

What he didn't tell is how he made it (of course). I guess passion, good prices, great inventory, some collections bought on eBay, tixs on the accounts.

Unlimited Pricelist Downloads ends tomorrow

Just a quick reminder for those who forgot about it.

Tomorrow will be the last day we'll be offering the Unlimited Pricelist Downloads at 8usd/month.

Starting from Saturday, the price will be 12 usd/month or 15 tixs/month. (the increase will thus be +50%).

Don't miss the chance to subscribe at this exceptional price!

Unlimited free pricelists - avalaible now !

Mtgolibrary.com is launching a new tool, the Unlimited Pricelists.

- The current situation

Before today, one had to pay 0.200 tixs for each download of the pricelist. For example, if one has 3 bots and each bot updates the prices every 6 hours, the account globally downloads a total of 360 pricelists per month. At 0.2 tixs / download, it's 72 tixs / month, a lot of money. To prevent the expense one can adopt a number of strategies, for example reducing the numbers of download per day (1 per day instead of  4) or switch some bots from PRO to LITE.
In fact all the solutions are suboptimal, and I have to admit this has been a big problem so far.

- Unlimited pricelists
From today, you can now sign for Unlimited Pricelists. What is it? In a nutshell it's a subscription that allows the download of the pricelist for free. The subscription applies to all your bots, regardless of the number, even to bots you will add in the future.

The cost, valid till next Friday,  is 8 usd/month or 12 tixs/month: in the majority of the cases this is much less than the sum of the 0.2 downloads mentioned above.
*** UPDATE: Just a quick note, because I received many emails with the same question: the Unlimited Pricelist applies also to the automatic downloads from the bot. ***

- Benefits for the botter
The benefits for the botter are mainly economical - paying less for more pricelists. Having a bot always updated with the prices means a better market for the collection.
I won't talk more about this, I think every botter could explain the benefits better than me.
.
- Benefits for mtgolibrary.com
Altough -economically speaking- the Unlimited Pricelists seems a non-sense for mtgolibrary.com, we don't think so. We discussed a lot before the launch, and the general feeling is that we can offer a better product and that having "bots more updated on the market" will benefit us indirectly (for examples with more trades, or more PRO licenses subscriptions).

- Single downloads
Of course the old 0.2 downloads still hold. We don't force you at this, just think to Unlimited Pricelists as a new tool strapped on your belt.

Percentage Correction evaluator III

Hi Gents,

here's the new Excel sheet for calculation bot prices. I've also added a few other things I believe will be helpful.

The first tab, "settings" is where the users start out. After they have copied the "CardsMTGO3.txt" file to the root directory, they are ready to hit the "Process Prices" button. This sets the file up for everything else. After doing that, the users can select different percentages from the drop down menu's until he is satisfied.

The users can then proceed to the "prices" tab. From here (direction on tab as well), they can enter card information and results based on the choices in the "settings" sheet. This is all recalculated if any changes are made to the settings sheet, so when they go back, the new prices will be reflected. The users can copy and paste the price data directly from the "CardsMTGO3" tab that was generated after clicking the "Process Prices" button.

 The final addition, because I became weary of continually editing my PersonalPercentages.txt file (the ; were enough to drive me mad), I created the "PersonalPercentages" tab. The users can now choose from the drop-downs on the left and the rest is calculated for them, again based on what they entered into the "settings" tab. Then all they have to do is copy the cells to the right (clearly marked by green cell at top) and paste them into their "PersonalPercentages.txt" file.

Hope you guys like/enjoy. 
Cheers, 
James 

PS: Carlos, I did try to get it so that the user could select from left to right the Set and then Rarity so as to provide a "filtered" list of possible card choices ...Unfortunately Excel limits array sizes and it is too small to do this...It broke after 1439 items :(

Prepare for something big....

Later on, between Tuesday and Wednesday, mtgolibray.com will have a short downtime for maintenance..... let's prepare for something big.
Sorry for the downtime btw, that will be necessary



Albert

Return to Ravnica Lifetime Licenses

We are ahead of a very exciting period in the history of Magic Online. Return to Ravnica release events has just started out and also the new client (Mtgo v4) is going to be released in the next few months. To celebrate this, mtgolibrary.com discounts the lifetime PRO license to 1380 usd and the lifetime LITE license to 138 usd!

Mtgolibrary.com offers a second discount too - the lifetime PRO license to 1200 usd and the lifetime LITE license to 120 usd. These extra discounted licenses will be active from the release of Mtgo v4. Of course all the other license will still work and will smoothly work on Mtgo v4.

Intermediate and Advanced settings

If you have been running the bot for some months, you should have grown a good collection with around 3000-4000 rares/mythics. This is very good, yet not the final goal. For a bot to be sustainable, it needs a larger collection, thus it's the time to accelerate and grow more. I prepared some settings: you can download them here (user.data) and here (buyerSetting.data).

After you reach 10'000 rares/mythics, you can then switch to these settings: here (user.data) and here (buyerSetting.data)

 Instructions:
- stop the bot 
- download the files 
- copy the files in the bot folder, overwriting the old ones 
- launch the bot and set again your bot name, mtgo password and mtgolibrary.com password 

 These settings are safe and will work well in the majority of the cases. You can of course play with them and change them at your needs. If you need help or have any question, just ask me at staff@mtgolibrary.com

Beginner's bot settings

Just got started with ML Bot and want some quick-and-easy settings to bootstrap and grow your collection? I prepared for you the right settings: you can download them here (user.data) and here (buyerSetting.data).

Instructions:
- stop the bot
- download the files
- copy the files in the bot folder, overwriting the old ones
- launch the bot and set again your bot name, mtgo password and mtgolibrary.com password

These settings are safe and will work well in the majority of the cases. You can of course play with them and change them at your needs.

If you need help or have any question, just ask me at staff@mtgolibrary.com