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 !

Tradelog + Cardlog

This had been requested for a long time: the possibility to switch from "TradeLog" to "CardLog" and see the profits on singles.

From yesterday (I guess many of you received wrongly formatted emails because of that :-) ) every card in the TradeLog has a direct link to the CardLog!

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.

Dealing with new sets, a lost cause?

Are new sets too risky to deal with?

Anyone that has been using MTGO Bots for a while has surely experienced that, many times, dealing with new sets can be stressful and quite tricky. Too often we bought a card worth $8 for just 6 Tix thinking we were "playing safe" to find out , a few hours later, that this same card was now worth $3 and we didn't sell it. I will try to my best explain this phenomena with all the questions and answers you might have about it.

Why does card value drop so quickly?

I could throw the old "Supply vs Demand" theory but on set releases is a little bit more complex than that. Although we start with a supply of 0 (zero), we will also have "humans" that are eager to try the new cards, and are up to pay twice or more of what a card is likely to be worth after one week which explains the high starting price.

The amount of cards generated in the pre-release events is huge, This has a much bigger impact in price drops than in paper Magic: the Gathering, not just because of how many copies of a certain card come out, but also, because how easily MTGO allows these cards to be traded.

Why does no one sell the new cards to my bot?

More than in any other time in MTGO, the number of "humans" dealing is very respectable, and while we leave a bot running for a few hours on the same prices, humans adjust their prices every 10/15 minutes. This is likely to be the only time where most humans in fact offer better deals than most bots, because these, tend to play a bit more safe with new sets.

What should I do then?

There are a few options:

• Don't buy the new set for the first couple of days and let the market calm down
• Buy it low enough to allow you undercutting humans and sell quickly
• Buy only bulk with Lite bots on the first days (so you wont be buying junk uncommons for 0.200 a piece) so when you start fully buying the set, you only need the few expensive rares.

My Choice was a mixture between the second and third, yet there was a few trades where I've ended up in loss (few hours without updating prices is all it takes).

Feel free to add your feelings and strategies on how to deal with new sets in the comment section below.

My Trades & My Credits

The functionalities 'My Trades' and 'My Credits' are now available online. These tools allow the users to view their credits and trades among all the bots.

The new logs are better than the old ones and now group the bot in chains, making life easier.

Ravnica Returns

So we’re going Back to Ravnica.  What does that mean for us botters? 

[1] I think it will pique interest and draw some players back into the game which have left to play other games.

Magic has been a game you can always come back to.  Players leave Magic for a variety of reasons: too many cards to keep up, finances, and lack of time being the most popular.  The Ravnica block was very successful and many players are interested to see where WotC is going to take this block.  All those who played during the Ravnica block now will be able to return without having to relearn a bunch of weird rules and can even use their own Ravnica cards for the new Ravnica Casual format.  (You know that is going to happen, right?)

[2] One of the writers here stated that he believes that the prices of reprinted cards, like the Shock Lands, will decrease and to plan accordingly.  I disagree.  The Ravnica Block Shock lands are not increasing in number.

But you just stated that they are reprinting the Shock Lands.  How can their numbers not increase?

You are missing the important point: the set which the card came from.  The Ranivca Temple Garden is not being reprinted.  Those numbers are not increasing.  Now, there will be a Return to Ravnica block version of Temple Garden and that card will follow its own path.  Printing different editions of the same card does not mean that their prices will approach a set price for all of them.  A 7th edition Birds of Paradise lists for 2.75 tickets while an 8th edition lists for 1.45, almost twice the price!

The price is determined by supply and demand.  The supply of Ravnica Shock lands will be the same while there may be increased demand for them, even with the reprints.

Ten most owned MtGO cards

Curiosity:
Basing on one of WotC articles the ten most owned MtGO cards are:

10. Rampant Growth
9. Giant Spider
8. Goblin Picker
7. Mind Rot
6. Gravedigger
5. Giant Growth
4. Lava Axe
3. Pacifism
2. Cancel
1. Naturalize

It is a nice succinct list of the most commmon common cards. We might observe a few regularities here. All these cards listed above were released in Editions. What is more all these cards were printed in several sets too. We can deduce these cards are the most difficult ones to sell. How many Naturalize cards do you have?

These days I cleaned up accounts and I have about 800 uncommon cards from different sets for sale, anyone intrested before I visit any random bulk bot?

Numbers

The profitability of a bot depends on the number of trades it performs.

For experience, I know that 70% of the trades ends up with a withdraw and only 30% with a sale. A minute or two usually occurs between two consecutives trades, thus it's reasonable for a bot to handle 7-8 trades per hours, and to perform only 2-3.

In a day this means about 65 trades, and in a month about 1950 trades . If you get these results (usually after 6 months after launch), you will most likely doing a net profit of 700-800 tixs per month. If your bot performs sligthly worse, your profit will decrease in proportion, still it is very unlikely for a bot with a good collection to go lower than 100-200 net tixs per month.

 Of course you can replicate the thing for any number of bots - the limits depends only on the computational power you have (i.e the number of PCs you can affort) and on the quantities of cards in the collections (of course an empty collection won't sell..)

Scalable, viral business

A scalable business is, by definition, a business that has the potential to grow "a lot" (10x, 100x) with no or little increase of the costs. If you run "X", you can run "2X", "4X", "10X" with few extra efforts.

A viral business, instead, is a business that exponentionally grows because of the word-of-mouth. You have a customer, the customer talks about you to two of his friends and they do the same...

Do you recognize something familiar :-)  ?

The value of an Event Ticket

Days of crisis and bad economy, still the tixs (and in general the Magic Online cards) hold their value. You can still easily sell tixs for 0.95-0.96 usd and convert them to money.

Why is the Magic Online economy so unaffected by the real economy? Indeed it is affected, but the effects of effect are somehow filter by the following factors:

• Magic Online economy is not connected to a single country (such as "California", or "France"), thus a bad performance of a single state it's much more diffuse.
• Magic Online does not handle real value items: the items are not connected to supply and demand and not connected to "physical" resources (oil, gasoline, and so on)
• The number of players / buyers / sellers in Magic Online is growing. Three years ago we were 1.000, now we are on average 2.500 and even 4.000 during release times. In 3 years will we reach 10.000?
• It's a very liquid market, with almost no fees, no expedition costs and free adversing. In a nutshell, the costs of "running a business in Magic Online" are close to zero, opposite to real world

Am I missing something else? Please write me at staff@mtgolibrary.com!

Trading with tickets

There are quite alot people out there trading tickets for e-currency, What i have seen PayPal, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker are the most commonly used e-currency holders.

I have been buying and selling tickets for a while using PayPal, some months ago i used Full Tilt and Pokerstars also, but i think PayPal is safer and easier to use, so now I only use PayPal. PayPal take some fees which the poker rooms doesn't but is very userfriendly and transfers are instant.

Prices on tickets varies pretty much for me,

depending on the demand and supply. Usually I keep my buying rate at $0.85 for each ticket, but when I'm low on tickets the price can go up to $0.90 each. My selling prices usually vary from $0.97 - $1.00, also depending on supply and demand.

If you don't have a very large stock of tickets it's more important to change prices based on supply and demand than if you would have a lot. Because you always want to have tickets in stock to keep a steady business going. Me for instance don't have so much tickets since i'm using alot of my bots profit for me being able to not take loans for my studies.

The best thing of trading tickets is that it actually don't take a lot of time, if you want to get started selling tickets using PayPal, simply register at PayPal.com. When you have got a PayPal account, write in the classified board that you are selling tickets, also write the price of the tickets.

When you have got your classifieds message up all you can do is wait, and maybe studie while waiting? The main key of running bots or any online service is to offer a good service and be available as much as possible.

When selling tickets the full trade should not take any more then 5 minutes if everything works as it should. Keep it as simple as possible for the people buying tickets, a fast and safe service is the best. When using PayPal a user can be verified or non-verified. Being verified is when you have in one way or another proven yourself to be who you sais you are.

I only trade tickets with people who are verified. I use a small checklist for what things to do in a trade to keep everything safe.

1. Ask for the users PayPal adress.

2. Check the PayPal adress on https://www.paypal.com/us/verified/pal=email so that it is verified (Need to be signed in).

3. Ask the user to send you $x.xx PayPal funds and to what mail you want the funds.

4. Check PayPal so you recieved the money.

5. Open trade with the user and give him/her the tickets.

I try to keep a balance between PayPal funds and tickets using different prices, but sometimes all my tickets gets sold or my PayPal funds run out, causing me to only being able to offer 50% of my ticket trading service.

If you want to buy or sell tickets, ask me! Klixxer at MTGO. I also sell credits for my bots Swebot.

Spellskite vs Omen Machine

Today I'm going to begin a new series on basic economics. I'll be using real world examples as well as pulling examples from Magic the Gathering. This is meant as a brief introduction to economics and not a substitute for an economics class or to dispute the finer points. Examples are for illustrative purposes and as a teaching lesson.

Let's take a look at two cards from the recently released New Phyrexia expansion: Omen Machine and Spellskite. Why is it that even though the same number of each has been printed, one has already been relegated to the bargain bin and the other has been touted as an instant classic? Why is it that one can purchase multiple copies of one card for well under a ticket and the other one costs more than an average dinner at an average restaurant?

Because Omen Machine stinks and Spellskite rocks I can hear you say.

I know that and that brings me to this economic point: Supply and Demand. The supply of each card is the same yet because the demand for Spellskite is high, and the demand for Omen Machine is low. Therefore, the price for Spellskite is high and the price of Omen Machine is low.

While this may seem like an intuitive thing to realize, this has applications in everyday life. Part of the reason the price of gasoline is increasing is because the demand for oil is increasing. When the IPad 2 was released, the demand for the original IPad deceased, which is why you can find the original IPad on sale for far less than its list price.

It's a simple lesson, but an important one. Most of economics flows from that principle.