1. Yes but you can expect some people to quit or gang up on you asap.
2. no. I should clarify that monocolored hybrids like beseech are OK if their colored part is correct.
3. 99+ commander.
1- Are cards like Test of Endurance, Felidar Sovereign and Serra Ascendant legal in the format? They seem to be a bit broken considering people already start at 40 life in this format.
2- Can I play hybrid cards in a mono colored deck?
3- Do I build a deck with 100 cards + commander or 99 cards + commander?
I stopped reading when he implied millionaire=retirement. Almost all the houses around mine are at least a million and I'm just a normal dude.
Stop feeding the troll guys. Who cares if this site is run by bots. I personally never use these bots anyway. Most people go to the other XXXXXXXXXbot chain first anyway.
As some of you may know, I run a bot chain myself (and out of respect for the site owners here I won't say which one), and I'll share a couple of thoughts:
1) A LOT of factors go into pricing. No bot chain is big enough to dictate prices on any but the hardest to find cards. Sometimes speculators will try and buy out the entire market in order to artificially lower supply and increase prices. Bot owners, however, can't deviate too far from the established norms or people will just shop somewhere else.
2) Suggesting that bot owners have a vested interest in the top decks and top cards staying on top is obviously bogus. The top cards from the top decks have the narrowest profit margins; there is too much visibility and demand to acquire cards (to resell) much below market rates. Any J Random Player can sell the Tezz that he opened in a draft for something between bots' buy and sell prices; he'll move it within about 15 minutes of posting on the classifieds. With that much liquidity, the need for bots as brokers is reduced, and with it our margins. Sure, we might make a couple bucks of off reselling Tezz, but we also lose a lot of money from the top cards when their prices drop precipitously. We make a lot more money off of cards with medium liquidity--cards that might take a couple of days or weeks to sell. In that case, J Random Player doesn't have the patience for advertising in the classifieds and just sells to a bot to be done with it. We also make good money off of cards whose prices are lower and don't easily round to an even number of tickets. We would love for these cards to go up in demand and price, as that's what we have a lot of. We don't want cards to fall in price, but having lesser played cards go up in price and demand is great for us. We make money and clear our inventory.
I can appreciate some of these off the wall comments. They at least make for entertaining reads.
In regard to the article I thought it presented very little useful information to actually going about developing a bot. Maybe that wasn't the direction you were trying to go with the piece, but as someone who would like to eventually develop or purchase my own bot, I just didn't take anything useful away from this.
On the plus side I'm usually a big fan of your articles, and the price charts are always excellent to see.
I am not. Though I am sorry you had a bad day. I gave measured responses in this and previous articles and he doesn't listen/comprehend, so: he is an idiot. I stand by that statement until proven wrong.
Needed to add a 5 star rating to counterbalance the ridiculous notions of JBK.
JBK and "this isnt the name i chose"
If you don't like tournament magic that is fine, you are not required to play. However don't start ranting and raving about how it is the end of Magic. For me constructed magic is mostly about the intense play decision trees you can work in, not about building your own special "yay-me!" personal style deck. I usually leave the deck building to the professionals who have the time to tune decks to their highest levels.
If your in the mood for Magic where deck building is important, how about draft or sealed?
Eh, this isn't going to impact either of you anyways. Nothing logical could change your minds on this subject I suspect.
Good day.
No one can read your article so stop insulting people for not knowing what it says. All your views are just people clicking on your link and being told they are not permitted to see your article that PureMTGO isn't required to publish.
Cards are valued by their supply and demand, their current supply and demand. Price guides don't speculate on what things will be worth in the future nor should they, they list current values and MTGO Traders price guide does an admirable job of staying up to date, reflecting values that change even throughout the day.
The bot isn't determining Supply and Demand, it's monitoring it.
Intently watching a few cards on MTGOTraders for a couple days (ones I had a vested interest in of course [and actually including Inkmoth Nexus]) it seems to me that the pricing system is properly self correcting. As the card sells out the price goes up when it's restocked, if an in stock cards stops selling the price lowers itself so the card sells again. Supply and demand in action. How this is implemented, I don't know but it seems to be the end result.
Your theory that Tezzeret can't go down in value due to MTGO Traders having purchased a lot at high prices is heavily flawed, first of all they don't have any in stock so they have no vested interest in keeping the price high, second if they refused to lower their price but players and other bots valued the card below their price when they do buy one they would have difficulty selling it.
What makes Tezz valuable is that he's the hottest mythic rare from the newest set and while he's played in less decks than Sword of Feast and Famine he's often run as a 4 of not a silver bullet for tutoring out. He's the lynchpin of the most popular deck in Block, in Standard he's played in Forgemaster Tezz and now UB Infect as well, he's seeing play in Legacy and those that do like to innovate are attracted to the myriad of possibilities he offers that haven't been explored yet. His value will drop but not till significantly more Besieged packs are opened but the most popular Mythics will always be the most valuable cards in the set their from because their supply is so low compared to other rarities. In terms of how much play they see Stoneforge Mystic which is in higher demand than Sword of Feast and Famine but it remain less valuable as it's only a rare rather than mythic even though it's been a while since ZZW drafts fired as often as MSS drafts do now. No matter how good a common or uncommon is it will never be worth much because so many get opened compared to rares and mythics and in a few weeks Go for the Throat will be worth substantially less and no one will be complaining about them being a money uncommon. Yes, Koth and Body and Mind both sell for drastically more than Liege of the Tangle but that's because no one's playing Liege of the Tangle, something articles may reflect but the root cause seems to be that simply Liege of the Tangle is by far the worse card.
Bots are in no way responsible for net decking and most articles being about the tournament winning decks. Net decking was a way of life for many a tournament player long before MTG was even an Online game. No store published articles on Necropotence during the Black Summer. Admittedly now a days strategy sites are ran by stores to draw traffic but they don't care which cards that you buy just that when you do buy cards you buy from them rather than their competitors.
If you can innovate that's great but not everyone can, especially at a level that competes with decks designed by the top pro's (which is what makes Block such a great format for the first two sets). MTGO Traders doesn't decide the value of virtual cards any more than E-Bay decides the value of real cards. Supply is dictated by Wizards of the Coast and demand by deck building minds as Gerry Thompson, Patrick Chapin, Adrian Sullivan, LSV, PV, Martin Juza, ect. Online play can be highly competitive and playing proven tournament winning decks is the best strategy for most players. Having articles accompanying deck lists is nice but if their were no articles people would still net deck from tournament results. MTGO Traders just keeps track of how much players are willing to pay for virtual cards because it's in their best interest to do so. If you don't like the high value of planeswalkers or mythic rares (which I don't either) I'd suggest directing your complains at Wizards of the Coast rather than the secondary market.
Complaining at MTGO Traders of all strategy sites is particularly ludicrous as their site has a strong focus on niche formats like pauper, ED, build your own Standard and all sorts of things that aren't the top Standard/Extended decks. How much extra profit do you think their bots make from running an article on the Standard Pauper meta-game?
Perhaps your time would be better served writing an article about your WG home brew that beats Tezz and Venser in Block, certainly that seems more reasonable than expecting a website to publish a rant about how the sites financial backer is ruining Magic.
What exactly are some of you agreeing with? These are the inane rantings of a madman.
I read through that entire block of text and all I came away with was:
1)"The Bots" have the market cornered and set their own prices at higher than the true market value.
There are a few problems with this. First off, not all bots arrive at pricing the same way. Sure, 3/4s of them just steal Heath's price list, but there are some who auto-adjust based on supply/demand--I wont mention the major chain by name here, but we all know who it is. This sometimes means that that particular bot has higher prices than the "cartel" and sometimes it has lower prices than the "cartel"--but never by all that much (in my exp. there may be a max spread of about 20% between bots--not chump change but also not evidence of a conspiracy to rip the customer off). We cannot see the total volume of trades on MTGO (like we can with the stock market) so it is very difficult to tell whether or not the trading environment is being unfairly manipulated. You might FEEL like it is, but that means very little to the rest of us.
2)I have an article that nobody but me can see that proves all the claims I am making, but the evil empire is holding me down.
Okay, its not difficult AT ALL to post your allegedly brilliant article somewhere where the rest of us can see it. Until then I'm going to assume it does not exist. I know you seem to think you know more than hammy or Godot or anyone else about economics, but as someone who actually is a real economist, I can tell you that what you are saying leaves out so many important (and obvious) variables that you cannot possibly have been trained in economics. For example: You seem to pretend that the supply of chase cards is stable when complaining about prices (such as your Inkmoth rant) but the fact of the matter is that it is perfectly reasonable for a card like Inkmoth nexus to have variations from week to week based on the number of people drafting, the number/popularity of decks using the card, etc. This is also not evidence of a conspiracy. you said that you dropped out of college to be a hedge fund manager...I have a real problem believing that you are who you say you are...who on earth would hand over their investments to someone who dropped out of college? What fund do you manage?
You seem very keen on the Ad Hominem attack and I think that it is because you don't have a firm grasp on the topics you are talking about and it is much easier to be condescending. And yes, I am fully aware that I am also being condescending toward your entire rant, but that is because it simply makes no sense and fails the logic test.
3) The rest of the rant basically boils down to "I don't like netdecks", "Mythics are too expensive", and "Hammy is an agent of the man and his price charts are an attempt by the cartel to shackle people into their nefarious pricing scheme"
I'm not entirely certain that you have any credible evidence of your alleged conspiracy. If Heath were really selling cards at above the MCP, then why would he still be in business? I think you are also missing a very important piece of the puzzle that might help you understand what is going on in the MTGO market a bit better: Card prices for STD legal cards online are shackled to the prices of those cards offline because of redemption. Those mythics you complain about have such a high value in part because they have utility above and beyond their play value and collectability. Even crappy mythics are worth a few bucks because you cannot redeem a set without them. This may make it SEEM as if there is some major conspiracy to keep card prices high (after all, why would cards that almost nobody will ever put in a deck still be worth 3 or 5 dollars?)...the reason is that the vast majority of that 3-5 dollar value for a crap mythic is derived from its' usefulness in redemption, not it's play value.
Long story short, a card like Tezz will never drop to $10 online while the paper version is $50 because then people would just build sets online and trade them out for paper ones. The online marketplace is partially driven by the paper marketplace. That fact is the source of a lot of your misunderstandings about what happens with prices. You will never see a major downward movement of prices online while prices offline remain stable, so a lot of the "price gouging" you are complaining about cannot possibly be avoided, its the nature of MTGO.
I think you must have some beef with MTGOtraders or are mad that you cannot afford the cards you want or something...but taking that out on Hammy and others who are doing the community a service is not the right way to go about settling that beef.
I can't believe how many people are in agreement with that JBK guy. I really liked this article and I found the charts to be useful already.
JBK just seems like a mean spirited person who has somehow been hurt by this site and is now on a vendetta. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of the current "one deck beats all" system but if that is how the set fell together then there is nothing to be done about it. Complaining won't help, that's for sure. Like previous posters said, make a better deck yourself and write your own article about it. And please don't keep talking about "that one article" you wrote that didn't get published because if you wanted anyone to read it you could have posted it to any number of free(not that it matters to you Mr. Millionaire) blog sites and posted a link as per Godot's request in the previous article's comments.
Also, in case you haven't noticed, demand exists for certain cards because people believe they can win with them or have a fun time with them or both. This may be influenced by sites such as this but that is no different than advertising in the real world. If people are swayed by an article about a deck on this site and then purchase cards from that deck then advertising has worked but it is no more insider trading than someone buying a car they see on TV because the commercial made it look cool. Furthermore, if the deck the site is writing about is actually winning tourneys then the article is more of a report than an advertisement. Regardless, the onus is on the buyer/player to make informed decisions about what they want. Everyone is playing magic for their own reasons. You might play for innovation and that's fine but others are playing to win. If the two happen to overlap all the better(someone has to innovate the top decks at some point) but clearly that is not always the case and if it was the case then you would likely call the winning innovative deck part of the problem because "everyone would be playing it." Not everyone can have a unique deck, there simply are not enough cards.
I guess my point is that no one should be telling people how to enjoy magic. There is always something for everyone (if you don't like the state of constructed, try limited...that is if you can find a way to play "without buying a single card"). I for one like to try out the occasional home brew but I also like to win packs once in a while with something like my copied pauper deck.
Just my two cents. And since I don't have $100 to spend on magic cards, I will gladly accept 100 Go for the Throat from JBK. I'm making an all Go for the Throat Mono-Red deck, pretty innovative eh?
I will try another tact since this seems to be not sinking in. If MTGOtraders and its ilk were to go out of business today, there would be NO market. People do not trust other people. Sad as that is to admit. People certainly do not trust WOTC (the corp) to live up to their word unless it is in their interest. WOTC can't be involved in a secondary market for that very reason. The government of the US where it is primarily situated has laws that prevent that. As it is WOTC walks a fine line with some states regarding gambling laws and pay outs. Not to mention taxation issues and such.
The bots as they are, are a necessary (if you will: evil) part of the system. Without them magic online would suffer greatly. I would LOVE the kind of scenario you are describing but I see it as wholely unrealistic. The only recourse there is, is to set up a 3rd party auction house and credit system and somehow get people to trust in you. Good luck with that. MTGOtraders bends over backwards to get people's trust and good will via PRE support, Quality stocking, relatively fair pricing, etc and they still struggle for it.
Their costs to run something like that would be minimal in comparison to the costs of having multiple different bot chains. You'd see far smaller spreads than you see with the buy/sell lists. Also, the costs of running something like that are mostly static, so with the increase trading volumes, that you get from not having to spend many minutes, if not hours to make sure you got a good value out of your trade, would make per transaction costs tiny compared to what they are now.
I for one don't care who gets the tithes: I just want them to be as small as possible, while keeping the system convenient. Right now, it is inconvenient, and the costs are high: the worst of both worlds. There's a reason the stock market runs that way today, instead of having every single dollar go through old style pits, which are a more efficient equivalent of the trading system we have today.
Just a general comment to the various detractors of the current state of the site. I am, I think, one of many original content deck builders/designers on this site though I have been quiescent of late because frankly I haven't been inspired to post a new article. I agree that there is some lack of originality among articles but there is I think still valuable information to be gleaned from such articles.
And then we have the likes of Lord E and others of his ilk who provide top notch original ideas for nitch formats online. Here is the thing. ANYONE can write for puremtgo.com if they follow some simple guidelines. To have your article deliberately vetoed takes some seriously bad writing and or content. So find the guidelines (Jyalt's article on writing for this site is pretty good for starters, and there are links on how to on the site itself.) And provide us with that content you feel is missing. Complaining about a lack or how the current content isn't up your standards doesn't help anyone. Be part of the solution.
So you would rather pay tithes to WOTC directly? That is what would happen if they implemented an auction house and credit system. There would need to be some tarrif just to keep the system maintained at cost.
A million dollars isn't cool ... you know what's cool? .....
So Kitchen Finks in mono White is not allowed?
LE
1. Yes but you can expect some people to quit or gang up on you asap.
2. no. I should clarify that monocolored hybrids like beseech are OK if their colored part is correct.
3. 99+ commander.
I have a few newbie questions:
1- Are cards like Test of Endurance, Felidar Sovereign and Serra Ascendant legal in the format? They seem to be a bit broken considering people already start at 40 life in this format.
2- Can I play hybrid cards in a mono colored deck?
3- Do I build a deck with 100 cards + commander or 99 cards + commander?
LE
Thank you for the comment.
As I said in the article Video 6 of the play-test session was lost, I have remedied the situation and here is the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_profilepage&v=MYJ49hXUGj8
First time reading/watching your vids. Good show. I can fully empathize with the 3 color go-around in the draft....
I know I hate having low-star reviews. It's depressing. I'll balance JBK, alias rant-man.
I stopped reading when he implied millionaire=retirement. Almost all the houses around mine are at least a million and I'm just a normal dude.
Stop feeding the troll guys. Who cares if this site is run by bots. I personally never use these bots anyway. Most people go to the other XXXXXXXXXbot chain first anyway.
As some of you may know, I run a bot chain myself (and out of respect for the site owners here I won't say which one), and I'll share a couple of thoughts:
1) A LOT of factors go into pricing. No bot chain is big enough to dictate prices on any but the hardest to find cards. Sometimes speculators will try and buy out the entire market in order to artificially lower supply and increase prices. Bot owners, however, can't deviate too far from the established norms or people will just shop somewhere else.
2) Suggesting that bot owners have a vested interest in the top decks and top cards staying on top is obviously bogus. The top cards from the top decks have the narrowest profit margins; there is too much visibility and demand to acquire cards (to resell) much below market rates. Any J Random Player can sell the Tezz that he opened in a draft for something between bots' buy and sell prices; he'll move it within about 15 minutes of posting on the classifieds. With that much liquidity, the need for bots as brokers is reduced, and with it our margins. Sure, we might make a couple bucks of off reselling Tezz, but we also lose a lot of money from the top cards when their prices drop precipitously. We make a lot more money off of cards with medium liquidity--cards that might take a couple of days or weeks to sell. In that case, J Random Player doesn't have the patience for advertising in the classifieds and just sells to a bot to be done with it. We also make good money off of cards whose prices are lower and don't easily round to an even number of tickets. We would love for these cards to go up in demand and price, as that's what we have a lot of. We don't want cards to fall in price, but having lesser played cards go up in price and demand is great for us. We make money and clear our inventory.
I was more worried about embarrassing myself by not remaining civil than being excluded but thank you
Didn't mena to exclude you Majellin, just missed it.
I can appreciate some of these off the wall comments. They at least make for entertaining reads.
In regard to the article I thought it presented very little useful information to actually going about developing a bot. Maybe that wasn't the direction you were trying to go with the piece, but as someone who would like to eventually develop or purchase my own bot, I just didn't take anything useful away from this.
On the plus side I'm usually a big fan of your articles, and the price charts are always excellent to see.
You sir should write an article on this subject. I think you could educate a lot of us in very important ways. Please do.
I am not. Though I am sorry you had a bad day. I gave measured responses in this and previous articles and he doesn't listen/comprehend, so: he is an idiot. I stand by that statement until proven wrong.
I'm sorry if I was not measured, kinda having a bad day.
Thank you Godot, Cownose, Barbarian King and jake_antonetz for your measured responses to JBK.
Needed to add a 5 star rating to counterbalance the ridiculous notions of JBK.
JBK and "this isnt the name i chose"
If you don't like tournament magic that is fine, you are not required to play. However don't start ranting and raving about how it is the end of Magic. For me constructed magic is mostly about the intense play decision trees you can work in, not about building your own special "yay-me!" personal style deck. I usually leave the deck building to the professionals who have the time to tune decks to their highest levels.
If your in the mood for Magic where deck building is important, how about draft or sealed?
Eh, this isn't going to impact either of you anyways. Nothing logical could change your minds on this subject I suspect.
Good day.
No one can read your article so stop insulting people for not knowing what it says. All your views are just people clicking on your link and being told they are not permitted to see your article that PureMTGO isn't required to publish.
Cards are valued by their supply and demand, their current supply and demand. Price guides don't speculate on what things will be worth in the future nor should they, they list current values and MTGO Traders price guide does an admirable job of staying up to date, reflecting values that change even throughout the day.
The bot isn't determining Supply and Demand, it's monitoring it.
Intently watching a few cards on MTGOTraders for a couple days (ones I had a vested interest in of course [and actually including Inkmoth Nexus]) it seems to me that the pricing system is properly self correcting. As the card sells out the price goes up when it's restocked, if an in stock cards stops selling the price lowers itself so the card sells again. Supply and demand in action. How this is implemented, I don't know but it seems to be the end result.
Your theory that Tezzeret can't go down in value due to MTGO Traders having purchased a lot at high prices is heavily flawed, first of all they don't have any in stock so they have no vested interest in keeping the price high, second if they refused to lower their price but players and other bots valued the card below their price when they do buy one they would have difficulty selling it.
What makes Tezz valuable is that he's the hottest mythic rare from the newest set and while he's played in less decks than Sword of Feast and Famine he's often run as a 4 of not a silver bullet for tutoring out. He's the lynchpin of the most popular deck in Block, in Standard he's played in Forgemaster Tezz and now UB Infect as well, he's seeing play in Legacy and those that do like to innovate are attracted to the myriad of possibilities he offers that haven't been explored yet. His value will drop but not till significantly more Besieged packs are opened but the most popular Mythics will always be the most valuable cards in the set their from because their supply is so low compared to other rarities. In terms of how much play they see Stoneforge Mystic which is in higher demand than Sword of Feast and Famine but it remain less valuable as it's only a rare rather than mythic even though it's been a while since ZZW drafts fired as often as MSS drafts do now. No matter how good a common or uncommon is it will never be worth much because so many get opened compared to rares and mythics and in a few weeks Go for the Throat will be worth substantially less and no one will be complaining about them being a money uncommon. Yes, Koth and Body and Mind both sell for drastically more than Liege of the Tangle but that's because no one's playing Liege of the Tangle, something articles may reflect but the root cause seems to be that simply Liege of the Tangle is by far the worse card.
Bots are in no way responsible for net decking and most articles being about the tournament winning decks. Net decking was a way of life for many a tournament player long before MTG was even an Online game. No store published articles on Necropotence during the Black Summer. Admittedly now a days strategy sites are ran by stores to draw traffic but they don't care which cards that you buy just that when you do buy cards you buy from them rather than their competitors.
If you can innovate that's great but not everyone can, especially at a level that competes with decks designed by the top pro's (which is what makes Block such a great format for the first two sets). MTGO Traders doesn't decide the value of virtual cards any more than E-Bay decides the value of real cards. Supply is dictated by Wizards of the Coast and demand by deck building minds as Gerry Thompson, Patrick Chapin, Adrian Sullivan, LSV, PV, Martin Juza, ect. Online play can be highly competitive and playing proven tournament winning decks is the best strategy for most players. Having articles accompanying deck lists is nice but if their were no articles people would still net deck from tournament results. MTGO Traders just keeps track of how much players are willing to pay for virtual cards because it's in their best interest to do so. If you don't like the high value of planeswalkers or mythic rares (which I don't either) I'd suggest directing your complains at Wizards of the Coast rather than the secondary market.
Complaining at MTGO Traders of all strategy sites is particularly ludicrous as their site has a strong focus on niche formats like pauper, ED, build your own Standard and all sorts of things that aren't the top Standard/Extended decks. How much extra profit do you think their bots make from running an article on the Standard Pauper meta-game?
Perhaps your time would be better served writing an article about your WG home brew that beats Tezz and Venser in Block, certainly that seems more reasonable than expecting a website to publish a rant about how the sites financial backer is ruining Magic.
What exactly are some of you agreeing with? These are the inane rantings of a madman.
I read through that entire block of text and all I came away with was:
1)"The Bots" have the market cornered and set their own prices at higher than the true market value.
There are a few problems with this. First off, not all bots arrive at pricing the same way. Sure, 3/4s of them just steal Heath's price list, but there are some who auto-adjust based on supply/demand--I wont mention the major chain by name here, but we all know who it is. This sometimes means that that particular bot has higher prices than the "cartel" and sometimes it has lower prices than the "cartel"--but never by all that much (in my exp. there may be a max spread of about 20% between bots--not chump change but also not evidence of a conspiracy to rip the customer off). We cannot see the total volume of trades on MTGO (like we can with the stock market) so it is very difficult to tell whether or not the trading environment is being unfairly manipulated. You might FEEL like it is, but that means very little to the rest of us.
2)I have an article that nobody but me can see that proves all the claims I am making, but the evil empire is holding me down.
Okay, its not difficult AT ALL to post your allegedly brilliant article somewhere where the rest of us can see it. Until then I'm going to assume it does not exist. I know you seem to think you know more than hammy or Godot or anyone else about economics, but as someone who actually is a real economist, I can tell you that what you are saying leaves out so many important (and obvious) variables that you cannot possibly have been trained in economics. For example: You seem to pretend that the supply of chase cards is stable when complaining about prices (such as your Inkmoth rant) but the fact of the matter is that it is perfectly reasonable for a card like Inkmoth nexus to have variations from week to week based on the number of people drafting, the number/popularity of decks using the card, etc. This is also not evidence of a conspiracy. you said that you dropped out of college to be a hedge fund manager...I have a real problem believing that you are who you say you are...who on earth would hand over their investments to someone who dropped out of college? What fund do you manage?
You seem very keen on the Ad Hominem attack and I think that it is because you don't have a firm grasp on the topics you are talking about and it is much easier to be condescending. And yes, I am fully aware that I am also being condescending toward your entire rant, but that is because it simply makes no sense and fails the logic test.
3) The rest of the rant basically boils down to "I don't like netdecks", "Mythics are too expensive", and "Hammy is an agent of the man and his price charts are an attempt by the cartel to shackle people into their nefarious pricing scheme"
I'm not entirely certain that you have any credible evidence of your alleged conspiracy. If Heath were really selling cards at above the MCP, then why would he still be in business? I think you are also missing a very important piece of the puzzle that might help you understand what is going on in the MTGO market a bit better: Card prices for STD legal cards online are shackled to the prices of those cards offline because of redemption. Those mythics you complain about have such a high value in part because they have utility above and beyond their play value and collectability. Even crappy mythics are worth a few bucks because you cannot redeem a set without them. This may make it SEEM as if there is some major conspiracy to keep card prices high (after all, why would cards that almost nobody will ever put in a deck still be worth 3 or 5 dollars?)...the reason is that the vast majority of that 3-5 dollar value for a crap mythic is derived from its' usefulness in redemption, not it's play value.
Long story short, a card like Tezz will never drop to $10 online while the paper version is $50 because then people would just build sets online and trade them out for paper ones. The online marketplace is partially driven by the paper marketplace. That fact is the source of a lot of your misunderstandings about what happens with prices. You will never see a major downward movement of prices online while prices offline remain stable, so a lot of the "price gouging" you are complaining about cannot possibly be avoided, its the nature of MTGO.
I think you must have some beef with MTGOtraders or are mad that you cannot afford the cards you want or something...but taking that out on Hammy and others who are doing the community a service is not the right way to go about settling that beef.
I can't believe how many people are in agreement with that JBK guy. I really liked this article and I found the charts to be useful already.
JBK just seems like a mean spirited person who has somehow been hurt by this site and is now on a vendetta. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of the current "one deck beats all" system but if that is how the set fell together then there is nothing to be done about it. Complaining won't help, that's for sure. Like previous posters said, make a better deck yourself and write your own article about it. And please don't keep talking about "that one article" you wrote that didn't get published because if you wanted anyone to read it you could have posted it to any number of free(not that it matters to you Mr. Millionaire) blog sites and posted a link as per Godot's request in the previous article's comments.
Also, in case you haven't noticed, demand exists for certain cards because people believe they can win with them or have a fun time with them or both. This may be influenced by sites such as this but that is no different than advertising in the real world. If people are swayed by an article about a deck on this site and then purchase cards from that deck then advertising has worked but it is no more insider trading than someone buying a car they see on TV because the commercial made it look cool. Furthermore, if the deck the site is writing about is actually winning tourneys then the article is more of a report than an advertisement. Regardless, the onus is on the buyer/player to make informed decisions about what they want. Everyone is playing magic for their own reasons. You might play for innovation and that's fine but others are playing to win. If the two happen to overlap all the better(someone has to innovate the top decks at some point) but clearly that is not always the case and if it was the case then you would likely call the winning innovative deck part of the problem because "everyone would be playing it." Not everyone can have a unique deck, there simply are not enough cards.
I guess my point is that no one should be telling people how to enjoy magic. There is always something for everyone (if you don't like the state of constructed, try limited...that is if you can find a way to play "without buying a single card"). I for one like to try out the occasional home brew but I also like to win packs once in a while with something like my copied pauper deck.
Just my two cents. And since I don't have $100 to spend on magic cards, I will gladly accept 100 Go for the Throat from JBK. I'm making an all Go for the Throat Mono-Red deck, pretty innovative eh?
I will try another tact since this seems to be not sinking in. If MTGOtraders and its ilk were to go out of business today, there would be NO market. People do not trust other people. Sad as that is to admit. People certainly do not trust WOTC (the corp) to live up to their word unless it is in their interest. WOTC can't be involved in a secondary market for that very reason. The government of the US where it is primarily situated has laws that prevent that. As it is WOTC walks a fine line with some states regarding gambling laws and pay outs. Not to mention taxation issues and such.
The bots as they are, are a necessary (if you will: evil) part of the system. Without them magic online would suffer greatly. I would LOVE the kind of scenario you are describing but I see it as wholely unrealistic. The only recourse there is, is to set up a 3rd party auction house and credit system and somehow get people to trust in you. Good luck with that. MTGOtraders bends over backwards to get people's trust and good will via PRE support, Quality stocking, relatively fair pricing, etc and they still struggle for it.
Their costs to run something like that would be minimal in comparison to the costs of having multiple different bot chains. You'd see far smaller spreads than you see with the buy/sell lists. Also, the costs of running something like that are mostly static, so with the increase trading volumes, that you get from not having to spend many minutes, if not hours to make sure you got a good value out of your trade, would make per transaction costs tiny compared to what they are now.
I for one don't care who gets the tithes: I just want them to be as small as possible, while keeping the system convenient. Right now, it is inconvenient, and the costs are high: the worst of both worlds. There's a reason the stock market runs that way today, instead of having every single dollar go through old style pits, which are a more efficient equivalent of the trading system we have today.
Always look forward to State of The Program, keep up the good work!
Just a general comment to the various detractors of the current state of the site. I am, I think, one of many original content deck builders/designers on this site though I have been quiescent of late because frankly I haven't been inspired to post a new article. I agree that there is some lack of originality among articles but there is I think still valuable information to be gleaned from such articles.
And then we have the likes of Lord E and others of his ilk who provide top notch original ideas for nitch formats online. Here is the thing. ANYONE can write for puremtgo.com if they follow some simple guidelines. To have your article deliberately vetoed takes some seriously bad writing and or content. So find the guidelines (Jyalt's article on writing for this site is pretty good for starters, and there are links on how to on the site itself.) And provide us with that content you feel is missing. Complaining about a lack or how the current content isn't up your standards doesn't help anyone. Be part of the solution.
So you would rather pay tithes to WOTC directly? That is what would happen if they implemented an auction house and credit system. There would need to be some tarrif just to keep the system maintained at cost.