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

Approach MTGO Finance like Warren Buffet

If you have been living under a rock, you may never have heard of the most successful investor in the world: Mr Warren Buffet, 83 years old right now.

Here's how happy investing money makes him.

This guy has managed to get 20% a year on any money he has invested - over a long period of time. In the world of investing money, he has no match.

Based on a long article in the Swedish financial magazine Aktiespararen, I have tried to figure out how mr Buffet would approach MTGO Finance.

Here are some of his principles and how they may apply to Magic Online:

• Evaluate the company, not the market:  Think about the deck the card you are evaluating goes into. How will this deck do in the future? What will the demand be? Can the card be reprinted?
• Choose the right company and act as an owner: If you invest in cards, make sure you have played them. Be aware of the interactions of the card so you can properly evaluate if a card is overshadowed by a newer card. If you deep on a card, make sure you play it. Constantly.
• Think about the difference between a card's price and its value: Rageblood Shaman spiked on MTGO as it has a lot of value if a Minotaur deck becomes a viable (even tier 3) Standard strategy. The card has a lot of potential value but had a very low price. If you managed to sell in time, you could have earned 1000% on the first spike (5 to 50 cents) .There may be future spikes.
• Buy cheap and keep for a long time: This may apply more to stock that actually on the average have positive expected value (EV). Magic cards do not. BUT overall MTGO speculators are too shortsighted. Act on the major trends - such as PTQ season and not fancy guesses about the future. (Check out my Seasonal Trading video - link below).
• Trade as little as possible: Warren wants to avoid fees and you should also act to avoid fees! Do not give the bots 15-50% every time. Sell to humans. Get your own bot from mtgolibrary (you only pay when you sell!). You can trade a lot if you do not lose rake every time you do. Be aware of fees.
• Invest deeply in a few companies: Specialize. Choose a format or a set and learn everything about it. Do not try to speculate in all MTGO cards. Avoid more complicated areas like foils or promo cards until you are ready. We have all tried to speculate in too many areas. Consider how many speculators are trying to break Standard prices - maybe you should be the one that ignores the current set?
• Never borrow money for investments: If you borrow money to invest in MTGO cards, you are adding even more risk to a market that already has huge risk. Do not do it. I do not think there are many speculators that do this but if you even think about it - DON'T!
• Act rationally, not emotionally: Be aware of yourself and your emotions. You are your own worst enemy. Do you have pet cards? Are you attached to an investment and can't sell it to cut your losses? Learn about yourself. Know yourself.
• Be aware of interest on interest: There is probably a situation where you can get interest on interest on MTGO but I fail to think of one right now.
• Learn from your mistakes: When you have to sell with a loss think about why this happened. What could have turned out differently? Why didn't it? Did you make the right call and then something bad happened (like a sudden reprint, for example) ? How can you avoid this situation in the future?
• Take your own path: MTGO finance is different because most of the people on the market are players, not investors. Even so is it really your best option to check Reddit and Twitter and do what Marcel does? Or can you find your own niche?

Thinking like this made Warren Buffet the fourth richest man in the world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forbes_list_of_billionaires#2013_Top_10

He was beaten only by three guys who built worldwide companies. It is hard to approach MTGO Finance like Bill Gates, btw.

Some of my other MTGO Finance material:

• Check out the Weekly MTGO Finance tips show here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoEgvEaipZg
• Warning! Speculation on Magic Online will probably fail for you. Here's why: http://youtu.be/mHwCO4QCWqA
• Seasonal Trading on MTGO: http://puremtgo.com/articles/mtg-finance-seasonal-trading-cycles-over-year-magic-online

• Dan on Good Bots and Spreading Risks: http://mtgostrat.com/2013/09/mtgo-finance-good-bots-spreading-risks/
• The Most Important thing about MTGO finance: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/10/the-most-important-thing_23.html
• When do you sell your card? http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/when-to-sell-magic-online-card.html
• When do you invest in the fall set (Theros)?  http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/when-to-invest-in-fall-set-theros-for.html
• Is Core Set mythics the safest investment on MTGO? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmyOxWT5qp8

Contact Info:
YouTube: MagicGatheringStrat
Web: mtgostrat.com
TwitchTV: twitchtv.com/MagicGatheringStrat
Bot:  mtgostrat. Show your support

Proft Stats for single bot, chain and all bots

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

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

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

How to survive the Born of the Gods release (or any new set)?

I am fairly new to botting. In the mtgolibrary manual, I read the following about running the pro version of the bot: "The Pro version of the Bot buys and sells cards based on card value. The Bot receives the prices from the CardsMTGO3.txt file that can be automatically or manually downloaded and is kept up to date by ML Bot staff. Each time this file is downloaded a maintenance fee of 0.20 tickets is added to the Bot’s overall fee. It is important to keep this file relatively up to date, especially when a new set or expansion is about to come out. "

So as the owner of a very small bot, how do I ensure that I do not lose all of my tickets when Born of the Gods is released? What if I can't monitor my bots 24/7?

Before I proceed, I wish to make clear that I am no expert. Having said that, I will tell you of my plan.

I will not touch Born of the Gods until March 1st. I will let the prerelease, release and the Pro Tour pass Before I let my bot buy or sell anything from the set.

I might speculate, but I will do so manually, buying and selling from bots brave enough to face the onslaught.

This is what I think I know about the release:

February 1st: Prerelease starts. Prices will be extremely inflated. It would be good to sell stuff, but I will probably not play the prerelease and if I did, I would be in a hurry to sell and would probably sell to someone else's bot.

February 7th: Release starts. Prices are coming down, but are still very high.

Somewhere around February 18th: Prices are at a low point before the PT spike. This would be the time to buy stuff. If I am feeling brave, I might let the bot buy Born of the Gods cards here.

February 21st: Pro Tour Born of the Gods start. Some cards spike hard and must be sold immediatly, which means it is probably better to sell them manually to other bots (if I have them for some reason).

Long-term we already know that the best time to invest in Born of the Gods will probably be mid June, as per this article: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/when-to-invest-in-fall-set-theros-for.html  That would be with the intention of selling into the PTQ Standard spike of February 2015.

OK, now that I have stated my very defensive stance, tell me how you are going to handle this and teach me how to do it when Journey into Nyx comes around.

Until then, let us Dream of Xenagos the god kicking the crap out of Ajani.

The Most Important thing about MTGO finance: http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/10/the-most-important-thing_23.html

When do you sell your card? http://mtgolibrary.blogspot.se/2013/11/when-to-sell-magic-online-card.html

Estimated Profit

Starting from today, 6pm, all the ML Bots with version greater or equal than 6.11 can view the "Estimated Profit" in the Tradelog. 

What is this? This is the projection of the profit, computed as sum of the selling prices - (minus) sum of the buying prices / (divided by) 2.  

The profit is computed as difference between the actual selling prices and the buying prices, divided by two because the profit will be "full" only when the selling (or buying) part of the trade will be performed. This profit is "estimated" because prices can go and up down, and you could sell (for example) sell at slighly higher or lower value. In a normal market the two values (estimated profit and real profit) are close.

Let's have an example. The bot in the image bought 4 Dissension Boosters 20 minutes ago at 1.92. The Estimated Profit of the trade is 2.008 because the selling price here is 2.924 and the buying price is 1.92 (and thus (2.924-1.92)/2 and multiplied by 4 is 2.008).  Only the CardLog, of course, can tell you the real Profit, so let's click on the link (see second image).

  

The CardLog basically says that the profit on a single item Dissesion Booster is 0.473 tixs on average. Multiplied by 4 (because 4 items are involved in the trade) we get 1.892: a value very close to the Estimated profit.

Hope you'll like!

An introduction to Standard Pauper

Content
1. Who is Dan?
2. What is Standard Pauper?
3. Why should you play Standard Pauper?
4: Where can you play Standard Pauper?
5. Where can you learn more about Standard Pauper?

1. Who is this Dan character anyway?

Hi! I am Dan. I am a Magic writer for puremtgo.com and mtgostrat.com as well as a video maker for the MagicGatheringStrat YouTube channel. In the upcoming weeks, I will write a series of blog posts for mtgolibrary, starting with this one. I have several subjects I would like to address, but I am also open for requests.

The best way to reach me is my twitter at @MagicGathStrat or by sending me a PM on youtube.com/magicgatheringstrat

Today we are going to talk about Standard Pauper.

2. What is Standard Pauper?

Standard Pauper is one of the most recent formats to become available on Magic Online. It was allowed into the list of formats you can select when starting a new game quite recently and it is not yet supported by any sanctioned Magic Online events.

It is a community supported format and it is the hope of many players that this will become a tournament sanctioned format like Classic Pauper (also known simply as "Pauper") did become due to community support once.

In Standard Pauper, like Classic Pauper, you can only play commons. The catch is that you can only play commons that are Standard Legal. Today that would be commons from M14, Theros and RTR block. If a card has been printed at common but not is not printed as a common in the Standard legal sets, it can not be played in Standard Pauper (Doom Blade comes to mind).

 3. Why should you play Standard Pauper?

Unlike the formats that have sanctioned tournaments, Standard Pauper is always far from solved. There is plenty of room for brewing and a suprisingly large number of decks are possible. There has been times when the format has been more or less broken, but right now, just after rotation, it is wide open. You could even say that the format challenges new brewers to try to break it.

The format is insanely cheap. Even the top decks can be bought for less than two dollars. As there are tournaments that are free that pay out prices (see below), Standard Pauper is the best way to get into Magic Online for close to nothing. In fact, you could get cards from the freebots, enter a Standard Pauper tournament and, at least theoretically, go infinite never paying a single cent.

4. Where can you play Standard Pauper?

You can play Standard Pauper in any of the practice rooms on Magic Online. If you are running the old client, I recommend opening a table in both the "Just for Fun" and the "Tournament Practice" room and then play at whatever table fills first after closing the other. That is probably the fastest way to get a game started, unless you are a member of a clan that supports Standard Pauper (which is something I could address in a later blog post).

If you want to play tournaments, you will find a player-run event (PRE) on Mondays and Thursdays at pdcmagic.com. These events are free but still pay out prices to the winners, which means they are a great way of getting started on Magic Online.

5. Where can you learn more about Standard Pauper?

The aforementioned site pdcmagic.com is the heart of tournament Standard Pauper.

Mtgostrat has several writers that write about Standard Pauper. Learn more here: http://mtgostrat.com/?s=%22Standard+Pauper%22

There are two podcasts that has Standard Pauper as part of their repertoire. They are Pauper to the People (more casual) and Just Another Magic Podcast (more competitive). You can find them both on Itunes or on mtgostrat.com.

Just Another Magic Podcast: http://mtgostrat.com/?s=Just+Another+Magic+Podcast
Pauper to the People: http://mtgostrat.com/2013/10/6321pauper-to-the-people-128-take-2/

Pauper to the People also has a forum where Standard Pauper is discussed: http://www.paupertothepeople.proboards.com/

Cheaper than running yourself?

Renting a Server?

I upgraded my PC recently, and yet I am thinking of remaking a PC all together with more attention to energy efficiency.

As all of you know, to get into the botting world of MTGO, many of us are required to do some investments in hardware and waste many man-hours setting all up.
Most Botters PCs electricity usage range between 200 and 400 watt. This is because most of us did not build our pc's exclusively for botting and more likely upgraded our "everyday use" Gaming desktops into accepting (more) bots.

As Albert explained earlier in late August, building a Desktop to run bot(s) can cost between $500 to $1250+, depending on how many bots you wish to run. You might be mistaken that spending $500 on a PC to run, lets say, 2 Bots is a good idea, but there is a cheaper option.

A PC which is not designed to be energy efficient, running 2 bots, usually draws on average about 200-250w (average bots constant low load) while the monitor(s) are off, possibly up to 300-400w while they're on (depending if you dual monitor, screen size, etc). This means that, depending on wattage and your location, a Botting PC will use between $1 to $2 electricity a DAY. Might not sound much, but this is $30-60 on electricity a month, just to run 1-2 bots, which is definitely a number to consider, specially for newer bots with a very little amount of trades.

I am considering building powerful, energy efficient PCs to run more bots, but while I don't have enough capital to invest into a whole new card collection I was wondering if I could use my hardware/PC Building knowledge and software tweaking skills into something new and mutual benefit of me and other botters.

This is when I had the idea of possibly renting Virtual Machines exclusively for MTGO Library botting somewhere around $15 a month or less (while you would have full access to the PC remotely, to pause bot, edit personal prices, etc). This would remove a lot of weight of your shoulders, not having to worry about configuring Virtual Machines, not being able to play games on your PC while bots are running, having to sort out bot updates or quick adjustments while on holiday and so on.

While this is surely not great news for those who already run 6+ bots from 1 PC, but, it can be for the botters out there that run 1-3 bots on their personal PCs(with power hungry graphics cards or so).

Please share your thoughts and let me know if you would be the kind of person that would like to be involved in something like this.

MTGO Library: Bot Customization

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-personalizacion-del-bot-parte-6-2/

Previously I introduced the MTGO Library bot and all its advantages for increasing your collection. In this chapter of the series I will roughly explain how you can make the bot customization, so that you can differentiate your digital card shop from the rest at Magic Online.

Before we begin, I remind you that in the MTGO Library home page there is a link to the bot manual in PDF format. This document describes all the required steps to start using the bot, however in this article I will focus on the most important functionalities so you know how to make the bot customization.

MTGO Library versions: Pro and Lite

The first thing to know is that you can install two versions of the bot: Pro and Lite. The Pro one lets you customize the price of each card separately, whereas the Lite one sets prices which mainly depends on rarity. To set these prices, the bot Lite version features an additional tab in your control panel entitled “Prices”.

Which version should you choose? Well, it depends on the sales and marketing strategy you have. Either way, the answer to this question needs a separate article that I have plans to publish soon.

From the bot customization of both versions point of view, almost all features are the same, thus I will comment them indifferently for both cases and I will only clarify the version when an option is only available for such version.

General features

I will assume you’ve installed the software and you are in the control panel, from where you will make all the necessary changes to the bot configuration.

The “General” section includes the information of the user account on MTGO Library as well as the Magic Online one. Besides, from here you can change certain bot behaviors like:

• Maximum duration and inactivity period of a trade 
• Automatically reload MTGO price lists 
• Operating modes of the bot (buy, sell and/or trade) 
• Management of the screenshots of your trades 
• Usage of prices and/or percentage changes stated by you on an aside personal price list 
• Set corrections for the buy prices never exceed sell prices 
• Also, you can force the bot restarts Magic Online periodically, which is a good practice because the longer MTGO client is running, the easier it stops from receiving new trades.

Finally, it must be said that there is a function that allows the robot to go faster than normal, but requires that the computer also reacts very fast. From my experience, this mode would only be used with an OS that is not run on a virtual machine (VM) neither it runs other VMs, and despite this fast mode the difference in performance is not too high in practice.

Choosing which cards to buy and sell

The “Collection” section introduces all sets that are available at Magic Online. When choosing one of them, you can limit the number of copies for each rarity on both, normal and foil cards. If you want to buy only some specific letters of a set, then you should put those cards on the personal price list instead. You can also choose to buy boosters of collections you want.

But these are not the only options available for customizing the bot regarding to the price list. You can also modify (for all cards and using percentages on the “Limits” section), the prices of all the cards in a certain rarity, as well as limit their minimum/maximum price. One of the benefits of using this option consists of avoiding bugs on the MTGO Library price list. For example, we may want to not buy common cards for more than 2 tickets (although there are some with higher value) to avoid price peak of a card that is not worth that amount. This way, all cards that have a higher price will be bought at a price of 2 tickets instead.

Bot customization on the classifieds

For me, “Messages” sections is one of the most important ones. Here you will be able to customize your store ad and messages sent to a client who is performing a trade.

There are two possible texts for the ad: one is shown when the bot is available for customers, whereas the other one appears when the bot is busy. Also, you can automatically add a text at the beginning to indicate this state (OPEN or BUSY). It is important to maximize the usage of the 255 character limit on each text in order to achieve two main goals:

1. Users shall find your store on the classified with the search engine. Ask yourself which are the words that someone would use to find a store of cards/boosters/sets… and add them to your ad. 
2. Shines against the rest. Some people are directly looking for stores by scrolling down the classifieds list, so it is important to highlight from the other ads. For this purpose, you can add special codes that draw typical Magic icons (you can find a list here). 
3. Clearly state what your store offers. Do not lie or give inaccurate information about the offer on your store. Customers will soon realize and will not return.

To meet these assumptions you have special tools and icon codes I just mentioned above. However, MTGO Library also offers the option of submitting the current prices of your cards, which can be published in your ad. Typically most bots show the most traded cards of the moment because there will be many people looking for them. But you also have many other options, for example:

• Buy/sell price of a card at random 
• Price of cards with a minimum/maximum value 
• Random cards from specific sets 
• Specific regular/foil cards…

The format to show a card with its current price is found on the bot manual. If you don’t select one specific card, the bot changes it periodically so the ad does not always show the same card. The more you show, the more likely it is that someone will find the price you have for that card. But keep in mind that there are competitors that will do the same. Thus, if your prices are visible they should be one of the best because people can easily compare them.

MTGO Library… Online

Once you have configured your bot, you can track the status and trades performed by your store if you login to your account on MTGO Library site. Full details on what you can do within your personal page will be discussed in the next chapter of this series.

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.

Everyone loves Discounts!

CLEARANCE SALES

May 1, also known as the International Workers' Day, is a Bank Holiday in over 80 Countries.

In 2012, a Portuguese Supermarket decided that for that day only, everyone with a shopping basket of over €100 would get a 50% discount (on top of any current discounts/promotions) .
This caused total chaos across the whole country resulting in fights over items on shelves (and own trolleys), police interventions and the struggle to fit it all into the cars, just to turn around and go back inside get more. Aside from all the accusations of dumping, this supermarket got away with it, as the investigation found out that only 2 items were sold for a minimal loss.

Although it doesnt seem relevant to us, this is a great reminder that consumers love discounts. What we can learn from this is that sometimes we can change the tactics, sacrifice part of the stock(or profit) and undercut every other bot, (announcing it as a clearance/promotion), resulting in a massive influx of Event Tickets but more importantly, Customers! Even if this process results in some loss, part of those new Customers will be back even when your prices normalize, which maximizes long-run profits.

Percentage Corrections & Estimating Potential Profits (updated)

I am writing this post on James' behalf.
He made some updates based on user feedback and fixed a few minor things on his spreadsheet. 
You can download the revised version here.

Changes:

+ Prevented macro from hiding "CardsMTGO3" tab; folks use this as reference to enter prices into other tabs.

+ Made table on "corrections" tab (hidden) now go from +100% to -100%

+ Updated drop down menus to pull from new "correction" tab ranges


Thanks James!

Percentage Corrections & Estimating Potential Profits

Hello friends,

I'd like to take a quick moment to say "Thank You" to everybody that helped with the Personal Percentages spreadsheet. I've had a chance to catch up on a few things and perform some much needed updates. There is also an additional tab called "ProfitLossCalc", which I'm sure many will all find useful when looking to quickly assess a profit/loss.

New Features:

• Updated drop-down menus to match updated percentages inside of MTGOLibrary
• The ability to preview card costs and calculate potential profits with/out fees
• based on type of license (Pro = 0%, Wiki-Ads = 2.5%, and No Wiki-Ads = 3.5%)
• There is no longer an "N/A" or a "Value/?" in fields where the formula can not calculate a number; instead they will appear blank and update as you enter data
• Ability to calculate profit or loss of trades while considering, if any, above mentioned trade fees

Now, let me say that if you are already familiar with the sheet and just want to get started, you can download the file here.  If you're interested in what's new (aside from above bullets) and/or this will be your first time using the sheet, read on.

Updated Drop-down menus

With the recent updates there have been a lot of great new additions to MTGOLibrary. One such addition, is the ability to select percentage corrections in increments of 1. This makes it easier than ever to set prices for your bot. You can now select increments starting as low as 1 inside of the PrecentageCalculations.xlsm

To Fee or Not to Fee...

There are 2 different modes that MTGOLibrary bots operate in, Pro and Lite. Beneath each of these modes, there are 2 ways one can run a bot. Either by paying a percentage of all transactions or by buying a subscription.

While the 2 operating modes are quite different, the methods of paying for their use are the same. The first way is by purchasing credit. This method of payment is done via a "licensing fee" which is based on a percentage of all your transactions. In this later method, for each transaction the licensing fee is deducted from your purchased credit. This is the method most smaller bots and low transaction bots will choose to run in, making this tab particularly important for them.

Now, depending on whether or not you choose to have the Wiki message displayed to your users at the beginning of a trade, will determine what your licensing rate is. Those that choose not to display the message pay a licensing fee of 3.5% on all transactions. Those folks that choose to display the message pay a licensing fee of 2.5%.

If you're interested in seeing how much a card will truly cost you (the cost in tickets + the licensing fee), you can now view that from the "prices" tab. Everything is as before when it comes to entering the information, except there are 3 more columns on the end. These display your profit with no fee, your profit with a 2.5% fee and your profit with a 3.5% fee.

In an effort to help determine how much one made on the sale for a particular card, there is the "ProfitLossCalc" tab. This tab will take buy/sell price, license percent and a quantity. Given this information, it will calculate if you made a profit or lost money (as seen in below screenshot).

For example, if I enter a price of 28.758 with a license fee of 2.5% and buy a quantity of 3, it will really end up costing me 88.431 total. When I sell those 3 cards at 31 each (with same 2.5%) I will bring in 90.675, a profit of 2.244. 

Care to see how much you could make if you had a subscription to the pro version of your bot? No problem, go ahead and just delete the 2.5% in each of the Buy and Sell Fee boxes. There you go.

Interested in getting started with the new sheet yet? Great! You can download the latest version here.

As always, I'll look forward to your feedback. Email, MTGO, Google Chat, Skype...whatever works for you I'm on them all :)

Cheers,

Jimmi

MTGO: b1nary0mega

The 'b1naryb0t' network

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 :(

Cardlog and Tradelog, blazing fast

Probably unnoticed, last week we introduced the CardLog tool. It allows to search for a specific card and compare the buying and selling prices over time. The CardLog renders statistics and displays the average and total profit.
I personally think this is an amazing tool, much more powerful than the old one we were used to on the old website.

We also worked a lot on the Tradelog and made it faster: you can now search in all your trades in few seconds, making it much faster. The graphs are also rendered after the page has loaded, improving responsiveness.

Percentage Correction evaluator II

We have a third update to the tool created by James.
You can download the new excel here.

Many thanks to the creator, James, and the blog readers who suggested and provided new ideas!

Let's keep it improving: feel free to post any idea!

Percentage Correction evaluator

Thanks to James, we have a new tool to evaluate the percentage corrections that best fit your bot.

The excel spreesheet is useful when trying to determine what percentage corrections work for your bot. Trying to find the settings that maximize the income and make the bot productive is not an easy task.... this helps a bit!

Many thanks again!

UPDATE: we updated the spreesheet

Directly quoting James, the creator:

There are 2 tabs in the workbook folks can choose from, they are "Settings" and "Prices". 

The "Settings" tab will allow people to see how different percentage settings within the bot will interact with the PersonalPercentages.txt file and show them the final result. 

The "Prices" tab is similar to the old file, in that it will allow folks to see what they are going to be selling and/or buying a card for. This sheet really is to be used for testing buying and selling prices when first setting up a bot. 

There are 2 other sheets, but they do not perform any calculations. The first of them is "Corrections" and this sheet is basically a calculation of the percentages and provides the matrix for which the first 2 sheets derive their final correction result. The second sheet, called "About" is just a quick thanks to folks for their feedback and how they can get in touch.

MTGO Bot Tool 0.0.13

As requested from the community, the possibility of loading personalprices.txt has now been added.
Though the complete list of cards may be a bit bugged at the moment. I will be looking into this for the next release.
As usual, full changelog available here and also included in the installer that can be downloaded from here.

*2013-02-21 - v0.0.13
-Changes
-Changed how the sets are loaded. Installing new version does not cause the old sets to load list to get replaced.

-New features
-Added possibility to set correction rates
-Added possibility to load all cards from CardsMTGO3.txt (Pretty useless at the moment, will be for the functionality to edit personalprices.txt)
-Added possibility for loading personalprices.txt into the general card list. Just reading the list at the moment.

As usual, if you find any bugs or got any request, send me an email on mtgoswebot@gmail.com or contact me in game, username: Klixxer

Statistics for the Tradelog

I am pleased to announce an enhanced "statistical" header for the Tradelog. 

You can now view the amounts of trades performed by each of your bots, the buddy with the highest number of trades, the ratio of "types" of trades.... and many many more things... just open the page and look by yourself :)

Enjoy!

The good of the new Redeem Fee

Much has been said about the new Redemption Fee, and for sure there are many negative aspects. Today I forced myself to find out some positive effects. I cannot think that WotC decided the increase just to put more money in the pocket.... I am sure WotC has a long time view... at least I hope.


- First of all, the price of the cards will drop 5%-10%. We will have the same amount of tixs online, but cheaper cards. What does it means? It means that our bots will buy more cards for the same amount of money, and that their collection will be better stocked. This is positive because, as I always say, the return factor of a customer is greatly influenced by the stock / the collection, rather than low prices. Many great chains have so-so prices, still they are full of customers because they simply have very well stocked collections.

- Secondly, cheaper cards and boosters means more newcomers. Mtgo is a very expensive game, and the average teenager cannot afford it. But what if he/she could? This type of new players could account for a large % of the base players. And once a teenager gets its first salary (after 2/3 years)...... he is already attracted to Mtgo and willing to spend money there.

- Finally, for redeemers, the situation won't change much. The drop in price will compensate the new fee, and more or less they will earn the same as before. The professional redeemers won't be affected too much - they will, but nothing dramatic will happen.