The Pauper Gauntlet

Welcome to the Pauper Gauntlet, Season Two!

For more information on what happened in Season One, please read here: http://magicgatheringstrat.com/2014/06/the-pauper-gauntlet-season-one-2013/

What is the Pauper Gauntlet?

• The Pauper Gauntlet is a competition between Pauper decks (not players) where the decks try to survive as long as possible. Every round decks are eliminated if they lose. The rounds get harder and harder (see below).
• In the end, one deck will do what BorosKitty did in the first season and be the last remaining deck in the Gauntlet.
• The Pauper Gauntlet is quite casual and meant to be taken as light entertainment. The first season in 2013 was a lot more successful than I expected, so I hope you will enjoy this one as well.

How can you get involved in the Pauper Gauntlet?

• You can watch the videos on the YouTube channels MagicGatheringStrat and sngprop
• You can read articles about the Gauntlet on this blog or on MagicGatheringStrat.com
• You can brew a deck and submit it to the Gauntlet in the comments below
• You can submit a deck you like to see played in the Gauntlet (that you perhaps did not brew yourself) in the comments below
• You can champion a deck and win prizes. This will be detailed in my September 14th blog post here when the list of all decks is known. You can not become the champion of a deck before September 14th.

Submit a deck for the Pauper Gauntlet

You will need to submit a link to your deck list including a sideboard plan in the comments below.

• Your deck is submitted for possible entry into the Pauper Gauntlet by posting in the comments below (and nowhere else).
• Your deck must have a deck list available on a web site that I can link to. There are several such services. Here is one: http://tappedout.net/mtg-deck-builder/  Include than link in your post in the comments below.
• You should include a sideboard plan to help me play the deck. The better you make the sideboard plan, the better my chances are to win with the deck. Remember that a majority of Magic duels are played after sideboarding. Here is a good example of a template for a sideboard plan: http://magicgatheringstrat.com/2014/07/pauper-gauntlet-competitor-13-stompy/
• Your deck is more likely to be approved if it is unique (no similar deck is already approved), if it has community interest, if it has achieved results in Daily Events or Premier Events, if you have a sideboard plan and if you have tips about playing the deck.

• You can submit a deck until noon GMT+2 September 10th in the comments to this blog post. If you submit later, your deck will not be in the second season of the Pauper Gauntlet. 
• I have the final say whether a deck is approved or not.
• The comments to this blog post is the only way to submit a deck to the Pauper Gauntlet. If your deck is submitted anywhere else, it will not be entered in the Pauper Gauntlet.
• The list of the 23 decks pre-approved for the second season of the Pauper Gauntlet will be posted on this blog on September 14th 2014. They are also available here: http://magicgatheringstrat.com/2014/08/pauper-gauntlet-competitor-20-familiars/ 
• You do not have to have access to Magic Online to submit a deck. In fact, several brewers were not on Magic Online for the last season. After all, you don't play your own deck in the Pauper Gauntlet. I play all decks. 
• If you make a video playing the deck, that makes it more likely to be approved for the Gauntlet. You can get a free 30-day trial of the software I use here: http://www.techsmith.com/download/snagit/  (No, I do not get anything for promoting them)

Some tips on brewing for Pauper

I made this video with David Shaffer last year. It contains some useful tips about brewing aggro, control and combo in Pauper. It explains many things that are good to think about when brewing, including why two-color aggro decks have huge problems in the format.




23 decks are already qualified for the Pauper Gauntlet
A comprehensive list will be posted here on September 14th.

Spoilers are available in the master playlist for the Pauper Gauntlet S02 here



The rules

• Whatever happens in the Paupet Gauntlet happens. There are no takebacks.
• Every deck is played by the same player to make it fair (me).
• The last remaining deck wins the Pauper Gauntlet S02
• All the details about the competition and being the champion of a deck will be posted here on September 14th.
• Every deck plays one match each round.
• The first two rounds are double elimination, i.e. a deck has to lose both round one and round two to get eliminated.
• Every round after round two is single elimination. Once a deck loses, it is eliminated from the Pauper Guantlet.
• If all remaining decks are eliminated in one round, they all advance to the next round.
• The details of the rounds are presented below
• The opponent is the first person that joins the match on Magic Online. I intend this to be random but if people search me out to play me, that is fine with me.
• Whenever Magic Online says I win (I win after playing, opponent leaves etc) the deck advances to the next round.
• There will be a voteback after round 4. More details in the September 4th blog post (the 23 decks).
• If there is a banning, brewers are allowed to update their decks or eliminate their decks if they feel the deck is now unplayable. 
• Brewers are not allowed to update their deck lists if there are no bannings or other really good reasons (making an error in deck construction to begin with is not a good reason)
• No more than 100 decks will be approved for the second season of the Pauper Gauntlet.
• If you have any questions, please watch the first video in the playlist as it has a FAQ. If your question is not answered there, feel free to ask it in the comments. Please do not try to change the structure of the Pauper Gauntlet now. There will be an opportunity to evaluate the format after the Gauntlet is finished (as there was for season one).

The rounds

I will play the rounds in the following environments. The idea is that winning will get harder and harder.

Round 1-2: Any practice room on Magic Online except the Tournament Practice room (the hardest)

Round 3-12: The Tournament Practice Room on Magic Online

Round 13: The two-man queues on Magic Online

Round 14: An 8-man single elimination event. The deck(s) that gets the best results in the event advances to the next round.

Round 15: A Daily Event/Premier Event/Pauper Event for each deck. The deck(s) that gets the best results in the event advances to the next round. As these are extremely inconvenient for me right now (starting at 02.30 am only) there will be only one of these rounds.

Round 16-inf: The Tournament Practice Room on Magic Online

How can you follow the Pauper Gauntlet?

• You can watch videos on youtube.com/magicgatheringstrat or youtube.com/sngprop
• For your convenience all videos will be added to the Pauper Gauntlet Season Two playlist (the video above)
• There will be some sort of weekly or biweekly show with me and some MagicGatheringStrat people summing up what has been going on lately in the Pauper Gauntlet. More details to follow on September 14th.
• Every match will be posted on the @MagicGathStrat twitter account
• There will be a blog post here every Sunday with the results of the previous week

How long will this take?

Last time it took roughly three months. This time - with a lot more decks and two rounds of double elimination - I expect it to last until New Year or way into 2015, but it is very hard to predict. I expect at least 350 matches, probably more than that.

What if I make a stupid play mistake?

Well, this video answers that question. I am by no means a perfect player and there will be mistakes. The brewer can help by making an extensive sideboard plan and providing tips & tricks for playing the deck.

Contact information

YouTube: MagicGatheringStrat (subscribe!)

and sngprop (subscribe there too)

Twitter: @MagicGathStrat  (hashtag: #paupergauntlet)

www.facebook.com/Magicgatheringstrat

Subscribe and Like please. It helps.

That's it. I hope you enjoy the second season of the Pauper Gauntlet.

The first deck (Illusory Tricks) will play the first match on September 14th. That match will be published on the MagicGatheringStrat YouTube channel.

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

Trades are low these days, don't kill your margins

Mtgo economy is a bit slow this week, there is a significant drop of trades among all the bots, ML Bots and not ML bots. I checked online the main chains (see attached screenshot) and I found them at least 60% less frenzy than usual.

Don't cut your margin just because this is a slow week: keep your prices and resist the temptation. Release Events are just 2 weeks ahead.

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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 6.46 - 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.

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Many Magic Online bots: Virtualization on Windows Comparative Benchmark

We host an article by Enrique taken from his blog: http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en
You can read the original article here: http://www.mtgeconomist.com/en/instalar-bots-de-magic-online-virtualizacion-en-windows-parte-8-2/

Let me say that the main reason for writing this series is the enormous difficulty I have found when trying to search for articles that compare the reliability of different virtualization utilities (in fact I have not found anyone good enough). Therefore, I decided to write my own experience and test the main existing applications so you can decide the program that best suits your needs for your Magic Online stores machine.

What is virtualization?

Virtualization consists of emulating an Operating System (from now OS) inside another one which is the hosting OS. This software runs a full OS inside a window, as if it was another computer. The window that contains that emulated OS is also called a virtual OS or virtual machine (VM in advance).

If you remember from previous articles, the bot gets the resources of the mouse and keyboard to interact with the Magic Online client, which prevents you to use the computer where it is installed. With this software you will not have that problem if you install both Magic Online and the bot in a VM, since all the commands in these input devices are virtually processed.

A VM consumes resources like any computer. You can configure these resources with the only limitation of your hosting OS, considering that it also requires a minimal amount of resources. Some virtualization software can overcome these limits but such software emulation greatly reduces the VM performance.

Of course, nothing but the limits of the hardware prevents you from running more than one VM on the same computer. Thus, you could have several stores in Magic Online using a single computer.

Minimum requirements for a virtual machine

Since each VM will consume a significant part of our computer resources, I recommend that you set the minimum requirements in order to run the Magic Online client. The general requirements are (this is valid for the current version 3.0 not for the beta):

• Operating System: Windows XP Professional SP2 “Lite”
• CPU: 1 kernel
• RAM memory: 1.5 GB
• Hard Disk: 20 GB
• Video Resolution: 1440×900

The OS is a very small version of the original one. You can create an installation disk from the original image and remove all non-required extra tools with a program like nLite. In my case, my version of Windows XP consumes about 60-70 MB of RAM.

The CPU can be configured with more cores, but I think 1 is more than enough to run the bot with the Magic Online client.

The minimum RAM memory needed is about 800-1000 MB. However, with this amount of memory the OS can remap the loaded programs to the Windows swap file, leaving the VM unusable. An amount of 1.5 GB is the minimum size I have set on my VMs with no problems.

The hard disk space of the VM does not have to be 20 GB, in fact all installed applications and the trades backup files will not take you more than 6-8 GB. Anyway it is always better to leave more capacity, because if you create a virtual hard disk file with dynamic space assignation it will not use more space on your physical drive than required.

About the last feature, the minimum resolution is 1280×800 but it is too limited and the bot may have problems. It is a good idea to set a higher size (1440×900 or 1280×1024 for example), and if you have a lower resolution on your hosting OS the VM will add navigation bars so you can see its entire desktop.

You must also consider that the VMs will have more or less available resources depending on the hosting OS. For example, it is not the same that the hosting OS consumes 1 GB of RAM rather than another one that only uses 100 MB. However, you should also keep in mind that maybe the first hosting OS runs special services for the use of hardware virtualization or other useful features for VMs that are not present for the second one.

The ideal hosting OS would be the vSphere Hypervisor ESXi platform by VMware, which has been specifically designed to manage VMs consuming as little as 32 MB of RAM. However, installation is complex and is not compatible with any PC. If you would like more information about this topic, you can have a look at this series of articles written by Thrillski.

Virtualization with Windows hosting OS: benchmark setup

Once you have viewed the settings for each VM, we will create them with the Windows virtualization software selected for this comparison. Two of the applications I have chosen are completely free and unrestricted: VirtualBox 4.3.4 by Oracle and VMware Player 6.0.1. I have also considered a paid tool, VMware Workstation 10.0.1, in order to see if there are relevant differences that justify its price for its use with a Magic Online bot.

I have compared the performance by measuring the average times of a sequence of tests that any VM will run frequently. The three applications have been tested on two computers with the following configurations:

	Computer 1	Computer 2
Hosting OS	Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64bit	Windows 7 Professional SP1 64bit
Processor	Intel Core Quad Q8200 2.33 GHz	Intel Core i7-2600 3.4 GHz
Hardware Virtualization	No	Yes
RAM memory	8 GB	4 GB
Hard Disk	500 GB 7200rpm	500 GB 7200rpm
Graphics Card	nVidia GTX 285 1GB	nVidia GeForce GT 220 1GB

Although it is interesting to see the performance differences between these computers, the rigurous comparison is done for the virtualization software running on the same machine. The tests involve measuring the time taken for the VM to perform the following tasks:

• VM first boot. Measures the performance without using the cache memory, useful if virtualization software starts upon booting the hosting OS.
• VM second boot. While you don’t run other programs, if you reboot the VM you will see how its performance is improved.
• Simultaneous boot of 2 VMs (same software). The aim consists of testing how virtualization software manages computer resources among multiple VMs. This test is useful for measuring the performance if using more than one store.
• Simultaneous boot of 2 VMs (other software). This test is used to test how an virtualization tool manages the system resources without caring about other VMs from other software.
• Running Magic Online update tool (Kicker). As this application mainly depends on the communication with the server of Magic Online, I wanted to use it to get an idea of ​​how virtualization software manages the network connection.
• Running Magic Online client. This test allows to compare the performance of data loading of Magic Online as well as the management of the CPU computation performed by the virtualization software.
• Load the price list of the MTGO Library bot. This phase of the bot setup makes heavy use of memory, which is important during the execution of the store.

Results and discussion

Firstly I will detail the conditions under which I have done every test to ensure repeatability and a good comparison between platforms:

• The first 4 time trials start right after clicking the start button of the VM and end when the desktop is fully loaded (icons and Start bar are shown on the window).
• Kicker starts right after clicking the icon to run it, and ends just after the check for new updates is completed. Magic Online client has been previously updated in all tests.
• The Magic Online client starts right when the Launch button is pressed on the kicker tool, and ends just when the login screen appears.
• Finally, the test of the MTGO Library bot starts when pressing the Launch button, and ends just after loading the OCR and before launching the Kicker. For this test the buying list has been configured with 4 copies of all cards available up to date in both, regular and foil versions.

Each test was repeated 5 times and the result is the average time obtained from these repetitions. The virtual OS has just the required applications pre-installed (Magic Online 3.0, .NET Framework and MTGO Library), and its hard disk has been defragmented and optimized. The bot version used is 6.31. In the following graphic you can see the results (the lower the better value).

As conclusions, firstly it can be seen that the overall performance of VMware products is higher than the provided by VirtualBox. Oracle software only seems to highlight on the bot load list test with the computer that has hardware virtualization, something that shall be considered. But in general terms, VirtualBox does not seem to be a suitable product for bot virtualization in Windows.

Perhaps the only exception is when you want to run more than one VM. As you can see, the test for 2 VMs with VirtualBox and VMware show a signifficant improvement on performance over the use of only one software. This is an interesting result because one could expect that one virtualization program should better manage the computer resources, but this has been proven to be false at least on the computers of this benchmark.

If we focus on the free and paid versions of VMware desktop, we can see that the time differences between the two solutions are not very noticeable. At least they are not for the cost savings of using the free version. Therefore, in my opinion I do not see it necessary to use the payment application to manage Magic Online stores.

On the other hand, it is also interesting to compare the difference in terms of performance between both computers. As you can see from the results, the improvement of speed for the second machine processors is very relevant. Although the memory of the first machine is twice the second one, this fact does not affect the load times for 2 VMs even with the exact required amount of memory. Therefore, it seems clear that the processor will be a critical element for the proper functioning of our stores.

In conclusion, for computers with Windows as the hosting OS I would personally use the VMware Player application. If you have a more powerful computer with more RAM you can try these tests with more than 2 VMs, compare the use of this application together with VirtualBox and comment your results.

In the following article I will describe the tests I have done to test virtualization in Linux with the most relevant software I could find for this task.

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!

The decks of the Modern Noob: Time Walk

I am a noob when it comes to playing Modern. That's why I have started a series about learning modern. You can follow it on my YouTube channel (youtube.com/magicgatheringstrat), puremtgo.com, my website mtgostrat.com and here.

This is a longer explanation of what The Modern Noob is: http://puremtgo.com/articles/modern-noob

I will use this space to present the decks I am playing while I am trying to learn the modern metagame. I am mainly playing cheaper decks that have put up results. This deck has some results but has only been played by its maker; Farfere. It is quite unusual.

The Deck
It turns out that there are several Time Walk effects in Modern. What would happen when they are combined in a deck? Well, this is what would happen:

4 Temporal Mastery
4 Cryptic Command
4 Walk the Aeons
4 Serum Visions
2 Jace Beleren
3 Sleight of Hand
4 Howling Mine
24 Island
4 Time Warp
1 Elixir of Immortality
2 Spell Snare
4 Remand

Sideboard
2 Spell Pierce
1 Laboratory Maniac
2 Gigadrowse
2 Swan Song
2 Ætherize
2 Echoing Truth
2 Trickbind
2 Rapid Hybridization
Sideboard plan

Jund: -3 Sleight of Hand, +2 Spell Pierce, +1 AEtherize
Bad matchup

Affinity: -4 Remand, +2 Aetherize, +2 Hurkyl's Recall
50/50

GR Tron: -1 or 2 Spell Snare, +1 or 2 Spell Pierce
Very good Matchup

Melira Pod: -2 Spell Snare, +2 Spell Pierce
Good matchup

UR Splinter Twin: -2 Spell Snare -3 Sleight of Hand, +2 Swan Song, +2 Trickbind, +1 Rapid Hybridization
Very bad matchup

UWR Control: -2 Spell Snare, +2 Gigadrowse
Very good matchup

Scapeshift: -2 Sleight of Hand, +2 Swan Song
Good matchup

GW Hatebears: -4 Remand, +2 Aetherize, +2 Rapid Hybridization
Good matchup
Mono Red Burn: -3 Sleight of Hand, -1 Remand, +2 Spell Pierce, +2 Gigadrowse
Bad matchup

Living End: -2 Spell Snare, +2 Swan Song
Very good matchup, watch out for Ricochet Trap

Kiki Pod: -2 Spell Snare, -2 Sleight of Hand, +2 Spell Pierce, +2 Trickbind
Bad matchup

Strategy
Step 1: Ensure we draw more than one card per round with either Howling Mine or Jace Beleren.
Step 2: Start timewalking
Step 3: Ensure you don't deck with Elixir of Immortality.
Step 4: Ultimate Jace Beleren two times.
Step 5: Profit

What happens if you actually play this crazy deck in a tournament?

I just did that a couple of hours before I wrote this blog post. Check out the full tournament report here: http://mtgostrat.com/2013/11/modern-noob-nov-2-update/

It was extremely stressful and I definitely need to practice more with the deck, but I did win a lot.

Where can you learn more about the Modern Noob?
I publish a weekly summary on mtgostrat.com. here is an example: http://mtgostrat.com/2013/10/modern-noob-progress-report-new-deck-goblins/

More articles here: http://mtgostrat.com/category/mtgo-modern-noob/

New videos are posted several days a week on youtube.com/magicgatheringstrat


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

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (Classifieds Advertisement Part 2) Part 19

Classifieds Advertisement Part 2 (Formatting):

Last week I talked a bit about Keywords you should use (and not use) in your Classifieds ad. This time I'm going to talk a little about how many bot owners choose to format their messages.

Classified ads vary a lot from bot to bot but a lot of them follow a pattern similar to this for Pro bots:
(|Open|)(Icon)(Header)(Icon) (BUYING)/(SELLING): (Card|Price| (Card|Price| Card|Price|....)
And something along the lines of this for Lite bots:
(|Open|)(Icon)(Header)(Icon) (BUYING): (X Common/X Uncommon/X Rare for 1 Tix) (SELLING): (X Common/X Uncommon/X Rare for 1 Tix)
(Ignore the Parentheses , these are to split the message up for the example)

Status Prefix:
The |BUSY|/|OPEN| prefix is automatically included if you check the box called "Automatically prefix | BUSY|/|OPEN| to the Classified message." inside the Messages Tab of the bot interface.
I prefer not to use this setting and have written my own (Busy Trading) message in the "Busy Class. message" Box in the bot UI instead. I'm not sure what's the best way to go about this but I find it unnecessary to waste your limited characters (255 max) on writing |OPEN|. If your bot isn't busy and a classified message is posted it should be fairly clear that it's open. But this is all up to you. It might be good to use simply because most bot's do, for the sake of consistency. But then again, it's always good to stick out from the crowd.

The Header:
The "Header" is replaced by the name of your chain. Often surrounded by (icons)(I'll explain how to use these later) to make it stand out from the crowd and also lets people easily know which bots are part of the same chain, and therefore shares credits.
It might not be very important if you have consistent names like BotBot, BotBot2, BotBot3 and so on. But it's very important for chains that don't, like the Supernova chain for example that have completely random bot names.

Prices For Pro Bots:
Pro bots usually include Individual card buying or selling prices prefixed with a "BUYING:" or "SELLING:" in their Classifieds ad.
These prices can be automatically inserted by the bot using different macros that I will go more in depth about next week.

Price For Lite Bots:
Lite bots often include "BUYING:" followed by the amount of each rarity your bot buys for one(1) ticket. And then "SELLING:" followed by the amount of each rarity your bot sells for one(1) ticket.

You don't have to include all information you want your customers to know though, as you can write messages in the message tab that the bot can post when a trade is initiated instead.

That's all I had for today, next week I'll talk some more about Classifieds advertisement.

Until then, have fun botting!

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

A comprehensive guide for the aspiring botter (Classifieds Advertisement Part1) Part 18

Classifieds Advertisement Part 1 (Keywords):

In my last post I explained how you can use the PersonalPrices.txt file to set personal prices for individual cards. This week I'll talk about what you should think about when customizing your Classifieds ads.

First thing you need to know is that this ad is your face towards customers.
Some more experienced users will use the wikiprice site to find bots but most will just search the Classifieds, so it's crucial that you write a good ad that includes the right keywords so new customers can find you.

Keywords:
Keywords are words that you should use in your bot's Classifieds message that are words people often search for. As far as I know Wizards haven't released any statistics on this so we'll have to guess which words these are.

Good keyword usage:
Some words are pretty obvious, words like "Buying", "Selling", "Common", "Uncommon", "Rare", "Bulk", "(Popular card's names)" and so on.

These are words you should try to include in your bot's Classifieds messages where they fit.
For example: Rarities and "Bulk" only applies to Lite bots and "(popular card's names)" mostly applies to Pro bots. I would suggest writing real messages like "Now buying Theros" instead of just cramping them in randomly.

A different approach:
Some bot owners choose to include a bunch of random keywords at the end without spaces, just to cramp in as many as possible.
Example: uncommonraremythicbulktherosthsfoilstandard

While this definitely will yield more search hits it looks very messy and a bit unprofessional. I prefer writing real messages containing keywords since I think it looks better and more personal, but it's up to each of you how you want your chain to be perceived.

Bad keyword usage:
Some people choose to include keywords that doesn't even relate to their bot just to get more hits.
For example bots using the keyword "Casual" or "Human" which are usually reserved for humans wanting to sell or trade cards using the classified by hand and not use a bot.

Some even include names of other big chains to pop up when people search for these.
For example search for "Supernova" which is one of the larger bot chains on MTGO and your search will yield something around 120 hits even though the Supernova chain only consists of eight(8) bots.

This looks very unprofessional and I would never deal with a bot that uses this kind of strategy but it's definitely going to yield more searches that picks up their bots.

So it's all up to you how you want to use keywords. You should never underestimate how powerful these are and how much traffic they can yield, but always remember that your bot might come off as unprofessional and even shady if you use the "wrong" ones.

Next week I'll talk more about Classifieds messages and until then, happy botting!

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

The "Five" types of bots

Often I get asked the same question "What is the best way to price a card?" as easy as this might sound, all will depend on how much money you are willing to invest into the game and how much risk you're ready to take.

I will start by showing this generalized bots with different price strategies:

We all already know that some bots buy cheap to sell cheap and others buy high and sell reasonable cheap, but many fail to understand that trying to be the cheapest seller and highest buyer at the same time, often leads to massive losses.

BOT 1: "The Cheap Seller"

This kind of bot is quite simple, it involves very little to no risk at all and while not getting the most visits a day, when it does buy something good, often sells it quickly and for a good profit.

It seems like a good easy way to make money, but this kind of pricing will make the supplying customers feel ripped off (when they realize how cheaply you buy) and the buying customers hardly will become regulars, as they might just be buying cards for the sake of being so cheap (or to sell them back to BOT 4/5).

BOT 2: MTGO Library Default Pricelist

This pricing is what I would recommend a new bot, while having a good decent profit margin to be called "risk free",this often falls in the trap of still being a bot that "doesn't buy quite as high as the others". Theres a chance of making some regulars, but with time they might move on into bots like BOT3/4 as they seem to have the 3 things regulars like: Higher buying prices; Cheaper selling prices; Bigger stock.

BOT3: "Average Bot"

While I would recommend the default pricelist to a new bot, once you start getting a few customers and regulars, you should slowly edge a bit the buying prices forward, this will keep your regulars happy. This bot will always pick a bunch of cards from what you are trying to sell, and also likely to have a lot of cards that you need. This is the perfect bot for attracting many constructed players, while having a decent profit margin.

BOT4: "Minimal Profit Bot"

This kind of bot might seem a smart way of making profit. Many would be fooled that this bot will make much more profit than BOT3 simply because it will sell and buy the same card more often, but this bot hasa few downfalls. Firstly a very short gap on profit margins often mean that you will not get profit in a few specific cards, possibility big losses. The reason for this is because you will sell a newly popular card before you have time to increase the price, or the opposite, you will be the first to buy a card when it gets banned before you can reduce the price. To cover the loss caused on "not so good" trades, you will need to make many "regular" ones to break even.

BOT5: "Top Buyer, Expensive Seller"

This is the bot which every drafter will have on their buddy list. Very popular for top buying prices, this is the first spot where drafters will try and unload their cards. The downside is that, in order to buy this high, you will have to sell the previous bought copies of that card at high prices. This means that while a drafter might be excited that you are paying top dollar for 2 of his cards, he will be quite disappointed that it hasn't picked any other of his 10.000 tradable cards. This bot requires "rich" regular buying customers that want a fully stocked bot and don't mind paying extra for having it all under one roof.

Where do you think your bot fits? Currently my BestDeal bot is somewhere between BOT4 and BOT5, then each of the other bots on the chain sell slightly cheaper and buy slightly lower.

Bots: costs and initial strategies

So far in this series of Magic Online bots, you have learned the economic fundamentals of the digital card game. We have also reviewed how to create a bot store that automatically manages your collection so it gets benefits for you. If you decide to start this quest and build your own store, it is important to know some marketing strategies that can determine a great success and a better relation between cost and benefits.

Initial costs and maintenance for Magic Online bots

You should not create a Magic Online stores without wondering how much the initial and maintenance costs will be. Besides, you have to take in mind ​​the benefits you will get from each store depending on what cards it will have in stock. First off, you must know that for every digital store on Magic Online that you are creating, it will have the following rough expenses:

Description	Value
Magic Online account	$9.99
Compatible computer with CPU Intel x86	~$400-$1200
Windows 7 Professional OEM license (allows a Windows XP license)	~$125
Virtualisation software (optional)	$40-$70
Energy consumption for a PC of 100W with fee of 0.2$/kWh	~$15/month
Investment on initial stock	$100 or greater
MTGO Library account and software	FREE
MTGO Library renting fee	2.5% or Lite/Pro license

Except the Magic Online account, all prices are estimations and may vary depending on where you live. With Magic Online version 3 you should use Windows XP as it consumes fewer resources than their successors. The problem is that official licenses for this windows can no longer be officially purchased. The only way is to buy Windows 7 Pro OEM and request a downgrade to Windows XP (this is supposed to be valid until 2014), although I have not checked this because I use my old operating system licenses.

Additionally, you can see that there are some initial fixed costs and others for maintenance. To decide how much you should spend on the computer I will write a sepparate article, because I think it is a very important topic to ensure the smoothness and scalability of your future chain of Magic Online bots.

On the other hand, you can check that I have highlighted the possibility of buying virtualization software. These applications allow you to run more than one operating system on the same computer, and they are the basis to have several Magic Online bots on the same machine. Although there are some companies that offer free versions, sometimes you may prefer to use the payment option in order to gain extra performance. Like the selection of PC, I will make a comparative analysis for a future article that will allow you to choose the program that best suits your needs.

Previous suggestions to plan the setup of your Magic Online bots

As you have seen, the initial cost of a Magic Online bot is relatively affordable. For this reason it is very important that you plan the growth of your business based on the resources you have. Below I give you some tips that may save you some time and money.

1. If you have an older computer, certainly this is the cheapest option in the short term to start testing bots Magic Online. Of course, this PC will probably have high energy consumption problems, it will be outdated and with limited hardware expansion capabilities. These factors reduce the capacity expansion of a bots chain in the long term, but it would be useful for you to take some practice with bots at almost zero initial cost.
2. You might also have the Windows XP license of any old computer you no longer use because probably your current PC will be updated at least to Windows 7. However, if you are planning to setup several stores this initial cost increases linearly. Therefore, you should only create the stores you really need or you will be losing money.
3. For virtualization software, there are some free programs but with the disadvantage of being slower than the payment option. For this reason you should choose it depending on the number of stores that you are going to install on your bots machine. 
4. You will need an initial investment for each store. The greater the value, the higher the growth rate of stock but you will also spend more money. If you make a large investment on each of your stores they may evolve rapidly, but if that investment is low in the short to medium term, then you will spend more money on the maintenance of your Magic Online bots than the benefit obtained, because initially the flow of customer will be low.

The relevance of having a strategy for the future expansion

From the tips mentioned above, I will give my recommendation assuming you want to create a chain of Magic Online bots for the long-term. Everything will mainly depend on how many tickets/cards you are willing to invest for the initial stock of each of your stores. In this way, you have two options:

• Low initial stock (~$100 per store): In this case you should have 1-2 stores. The main one should have a Pro license (buy/sell any card with unique prices) with 2.5% renting fee and buy/sell cards just from the latest expansion available in Magic Online. This limitation is very favourable because that set will be the most drafteable one, so there will be huge quantity of cards at a very good buy/sell rate. If you choose to have a secondary store, it should buy cards in bulk through a Lite license (all rarities at same prices) also with a renting fee of 2.5%. This second store must buy the cards cheaper than the main one, and it should be configured to refill the main stock because clients are more interested on pro stores that are always full of stock. As new sets are becoming available, your store should accept them to slowly go expanding your business. 
• High initial stock (~$500 or more per store): For these quantities the store should not have many problems to grow quickly (obviously with a good marketing). With amounts between $500-$1000 I would start buying/selling standard, and from there I would include Modern and even Legacy. The Professional version is required for these types of stores, but it would also be a good idea to have one or two Lite stores to maximize profits. Use the monthly license fee or better when you move amounts greater than 90 tickets/day (these licenses cost 63 tickets/month or less), and 2.5% commission per transaction otherwise. One strategy that can combine any of the above options is to use, for each store you are planning to create, two stores instead: one that exclusively buys cards and another that only makes sales. As this alternative would double the computation costs of your computer and limits you to create new stores, this strategy is only recommended whenever you have a high traffic of customers. Thus, you avoid your Magic Online bots from being always busy (remember you can only trade cards with one customer at once, so if a customer is waiting for trade he would probably go to another store).

Final thoughts

Although the growth stock of the strategy (a) is slow in time, it is also safer and with a relatively low initial cost. Therefore, this solution is favorable for those who cannot afford high investment and for those who will not spend much time maintaining their Magic Online bots.

Unlike (a), in case (b) the growth is much faster but you have to be careful and keep the prices updated. If you have cash, your stores will be targeted by customers who hope to also make some profit with the most expensive cards. The problem is that those cards leave your store/s without tickets and until sold you do get zero benefit (in fact it is a temporary loss state). The main problem is that those cards can vary greatly over the cheap price and generate losses due to these fluctuations. Thus, with this strategy you must be much more aware of your store to avoid short term buys/sells that may provoke loses.

Now that you have a long-term idea of ​​how you are going to expand your chain of Magic Online bots for profit, in future articles I will comment more technical aspects related to mount your stores, such as the required hardware and software.

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.