But how much of that is the "me" generation that wants everything served to them on a silver platter with a minimal amount of sweat on their part, and how much of it is simple inability? There are programs and tutorials out there to help you get your own bot up and running. If people don't avail themselves of that it's because they either don't think it's worth it or are too lazy. Either way, I don't think it's a big problem of accessibility and I don't think it's a problem that necessarily needs fixing. Implementing a better Classifieds search function would go a long way to improving the usability of person-to-person exchange.
I guess I just think panning bots (not that you did, but others do oh so often) is such low-hanging fruit when in reality the serve a pretty good function.
The social contract is important online but to everyone that's entirely different, there's no actual way of enforcing this online to a great extent. Although some may block you, it isn't hard to find and play with others whom wholly endorse a combo deck. Online you're more than likely playing to win, because you don't know these people and have never met them you'll take no shame in beating them into the ground, whereas in real life you're looking for a good time between friends in a social environment.
I find a social contract entirely incomprehensible online unless stated within the game description in plain and simple terms, such examples "no cloudpost, eldrazi, planeswalkers, infect.." so on so forth. With these descriptors clearly stating what is acceptable and what isn't within that contract of that game terms are made clear otherwise you'll join a game play wasteland/plague stinger/jace beleren or even Liquimetal Coating (which I was told was too unfair once when I used it to destroy creatures) and find the social contract is in turmoil due to misunderstanding of what both players (Or more) wanted from that game. There are three culprits I see doing this in the casual room EVERY DAY. I can name them right now but I'm not entirely sure on the ethics of it.
Just as a more personal point, if someone was playing discard and heavy creature kill I would not block them, coming prepared to fight the strategies of your opponent is hardly unfair, he's packing discard? You should be packing a way to fight it (Regrowth, E-Witness, Grim Discovery, Relearn, Call to Mind, Miraculous Rebirth), I would feel the same for the lock, if you let him set it up then the rest of the table is to blame. If someone has Arcum Dagasson as their general and you let them tutor something incredibly stupid, that is entirely your fault.
This is jiving off topic a bit but I just want to add one more thing.
I agree with what you said, but let's be realistic here. A lot of users online would love to have a bot but don't have the time or the knowledge required to write them. The market would be better off if everyone could buy and sell cards on equal an footing, and there's no reason this can't happen. It would be better for the game and the market in the long run. How much of the MTGO population now do you think owns and operates a bot? Around 10%? ~10% of the population can trade cards at a fraction of a ticket. There is something wrong with that in my opinion.
As a hobbyist coder I can't disagree more. The algorithms used by MTGO reflect a random (if sometimes disagreeable) draw. If you and those whose anectdotal stories being referenced, are experiencing fluctuations in the draw that deviate vastly from the norm, all I can say is you probably have a great love life. :) I know from bad shuffling (irl it is so common it is disgusting) and I know from bad draws (again disgusting.)
The one thing I have observed (so anecdotal evidence only here) is that it(the shuffler) seems to start at a fixed index with a new deck list which means that your first few draws after building a list may seem very unrandom. It takes a few shuffles before the draws become "truly" random. Which is to say: shuffle up.
This is something WotC could fix by including a shuffle button at the pre play/draw stage of the game, but I doubt they consider it a problem at all much less something in need of a fix.
Meantime if you are having bad draws mulligan more aggressively, brush up on deck building (everyone can improve in this area), and ask others for their advice on your deck. It could be your curves are consistently too high for the meta you are in.
I disagree that the social contract is unimportant online; nowhere else is it more important. It is exactly for the reasons you said that it is important to have a vague understanding of what the spirit of the format is. If you play a good amount of Commander on MTGO you'll quickly realize the pool of people who play it isn't that large. The same people will appear in games over and over. If you get a reputation as being a griefer, rude, or unfun, you'll either find people unwilling to play with you or yourself the target from the start. Doing one's best to keep the social contract in mind helps to ensure that the entire table has fun, not just one person.
And I didn't say this deck was particularly good or hard to stop, especially now that it's "out in the open" as you said. It's the spirit of the deck I was talking about, and the spirit is what I think is relevant. This deck certainly does not consider the opponents' enjoyment. It seeks to empty their hands and keep them that way. That's the difference between this lock and Myojin of Night's Reach. The Myojin empties everyone's hands and that can be annoying. But you start drawing cards as soon as your turn comes back around. You still get to do stuff the rest of the game. This deck tries to empty your hand, keep it empty, and then slowly kill you over 10 or more turns.
"How about this old guy who should be taking care of his kids instead of playing MTGO."
"Which is a gay name regardless"
Kewl dood. you can trollz on dem interwebz. U Am mah hero.
Anyway, back to the topic that ISN'T troll bait, there are plenty of tutorials and ways to make bots, and there is nothing to stop people from doing so. Often times the "human" labelled classifieds have buy prices below bots and sell prices higher than bots. A case in point is a hard to find Scent of Cinder promo, which is my favourite art. I found two in bots for 1.9 and 2.3 cents respectively, but I have only seen humans selling this card for 2-3 tickets. It's too easy to paint all bots as evil. They are what they are. No one in MTGO is altruistic and just handing out free tickets and everyone wants a good deal. Nothing wrong with that when you have the free will/choice to choose whatever bot/human you want.
Re: bots keeping the change... just buddy bots you have leftover credit from and use them the next time you want to buy some random stuff. Better to buy from them for regular market value than to lose that credit altogether.
judging how myojin of nights reach is one of the more popular cards in edh I think perhaps you are the one mistaking the social contract. Not to mention that there are three of you against him. if the three of you let him go off, you suck. especially now that the deck is out in the open.
the social contract also doesnt apply online since in edh, the main rule over all of it is that individual groups can edit it as they see fit. not all groups have banned emrakul and not all groups hate disvard or locks. on mtgo its hard to form such groups out side of making a clan. so if you join random games you are essentially agreeing to 3 random individuals interpretation of an already loosely phrased non binding contract. aka you get what you get.
If I played against this deck, I probably block you so I could avoid playing with you again. Heavy discard and creature kill plus a slow-to-kill lock? This is the ultimate griefer deck. You complain (with a condescending tone, I might add) about players going into "a raving fit about the evils of discard in a casual environment," but they are making completely valid complaints. If you're unfamiliar with it (and I suspect you might be), you should read about the concept of a "social contract" in EDH.
RE: adjusting your mic settings, if you don't like how it sounds after you record, you can filter with reverb filters and or others to see how that makes things sound.
If you run a hedge fund, you should be familiar with basic random numerical number generator. Pseudo-random number generators are "random enough"to the degree of 10ˆ31 using a widely used method. With the computing power these days, it's not even hard to code this up. The only problem could be from how mtgo labels individual cards and keeps track of it.
Just look up ran2 function from numerical recipes. hell. ran1 is enough for the sake of mtgo really.
Mtgo bot prices might not be the most fair price but it's much better than paying the paper price. Common to most rare cards are dirt cheap and mtgo is a incredibly cheap experience if you stick to budget cards. That's because of the drafters dumping their cards and tourney players picking out the top cards. Bots go in the middle and make profit. Also mtgo bot prices does somewhat run on supply and demand. People buy up high price rares much akin to future expectation of stocks.
I am selfish, no doubt. I cop to it. Also I am not anti combo. I am anti infinite engine. If you can pull off a combo that doesn't go infinite I am all for it. I am not so happy about infinite (or arbitrarily large numbers of) turns for example. If you want to show you can break the game and make it unfun for everyone fine but don't expect me to be cheering.
"How about this old guy who should be taking care of his kids instead of playing MTGO." I stopped reading right here. You "sir", are an a$$. Ad hominem arguments are absurd, useless and only go to show how witless you really are.
Nowhere was it ever said that someone who has kids can't have hobbies. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read in Godot's articles that he's included his children in his hobby. You need to grow up and stop accosting people anonymously on the internet. This isn't 4chan and I, frankly, won't stand for this. You can go ahead and flame back all you want but the fact of the matter is Godot expressed his opinion and you just went ahead and baselessly mocked the man. You may disagree with him but he never said that you were a bad person,bad father or some other nonsense.
You need to grow up and get a life, something that Godot apparently does have...as evidenced by his family.
How about this old guy who should be taking care of his kids instead of playing MTGO. If you haven't noticed, there is a direct correlation between the use of a card and the price. You can look at the use of a card and the price going up or down, where down is the higher use of a card, and the higher is a lower use of a card.
And here is one simple way bots rip off people.
Bots sell in increments. That means that if they sell a card for anything outside of 1 ticket increments, you lose money. Like something that is 1.6 means that you are losing 0.40. Even if you deal in credits, a lot of people don't go to the same bot or can find the same bot.
And the article was banned. I was talking with the editor and he said it would be up to the owners of the trading website, and they didn't like it.
But the biggest thing, and the funniest thing GoDot? Which is a gay name regardless, the website that owns bots is also a price guide. That means they do things in their own interest, and not the interest of the people playing. And guess what, if you hurt your customers over the long run, they don't come back.
But that's cool. I only dropped out of college to open a hedge fund, something you could never say. So I know a little bit about economics, and from what I can see, this is a conflict of interest. It is as close to insider trading you could get in something that doesn't have an actual market.
Its very simple to quantify a market for a true price. Its more difficult to get that message out. I tried this website because it was established. I am not great at HTML, and I'm not great with making websites. It would be better because its already out there. Starting something new would take work, something I don't want to deal with because I have a life.
Paul, come on. Combo is a legitimate way to play this game that many players love. In real life at your kitchen table, if your opponent demonstrated an engine and said, "repeat that a million times," you wouldn't say, "No, you actually have to execute it manually with the cards," would you?
The lack of engine macros on MTGO shuts off an entire class of deck from viability online that is totally fine on paper, and that's a shame. You hate the idea of giving players the same tools to play a combo deck online that they have in real life, presumably because you don't like combo? That's just being selfish...how about supporting the idea of combo macros to further allow the online game to mirror the paper game, and then put "no combo, please" in your game comments. :)
JBK, you call into question your credibility right out of the gate by citing the need to "fix the shuffler." I would love to see your conclusive statistical research proving insufficient MTGO randomization.
Can you cite some examples of in increase in card use (how are you measuring that anyway?) leading to a decrease in price (that is not clearly attributable to another factor, such as new-set prices dying down as supply increases)? My observation has been that an increase in a card's demand due to the start of extended season or the card's inclusion in a hot new deck is that the price goes up, and I've speculated successfully many times based on that observation.
On the one hand you say bots rip people off, but then you gloat about ripping bots off. I would say a bot has only "ripped someone off" if they it successfully sells a card for way more than others are selling it for, or buys a card for much less than others are paying for it. In either case, the "victim" should have price checked more thoroughly.
If your logic in this post is indicative of your logic in your "banned article," perhaps it wasn't banned, but just rejected. Then again, maybe I just don't understand your summary in the comments, here. Why don't you put it up somewhere for us to see? Maybe if I read the whole thing your points would make sense. It would take under five minutes to start a blog, paste in your article, and give us a url...
Agree with a lot of the post above. Until we get a reasonable trading system in place where humans can trade fractions of a tickets, or set prices for items in their collection allowing for personalized, and/or AFK buying/selling to a larger degree, the classified section is going to remain one big mess.
I like the script ideas as well, but am not optimistic about seeing any changes anytime soon.
I think the cards do add up to 60 and 15 it's just the numbers at the bottom don't because the links to Mirrodin Beseiged cards aren't working yet. I imagine Pete put the links in manually but forgot to change the numbers at the bottom of each grouping.
Not sure I'm a massive fan of the affiliated deck idea, especially as you point out that Phyrexian decks are pretty limited to being Infect decks (which isn't even a Tier 1 deck). Congratulations on coming up with quite an innovative take on a Phyrexian deck though.
I'm sure the Suture Priest will be played with Soul's Attendant as a new take on Soul Sisters, but as you say I doubt it will be Tier-1, especially without Ranger of Eos.
I agree about the 1/1 in limited. The one I now have is paper, and only playable in casual games at the store, etc.
The list is missing some sideboard cards. Sideboard should have 2 Flashfreeze.
Maindeck is 60 cards, just that I forgot to correct the totals. The deck display widget does not yet recognize Besieged cards, so it does not hyperlink them or include them in the totals. I did drag them around, and add links, but forgot to fix the other cards total.
If you want to know the subtle tricks bots use and how to create a real price for MTGO cards, this article might help. If articles like this keep getting ignored, the game will die out. If articles like this are embraced, we can save the game.
This is because the game of Magic shouldn't be the battle of the rich, it should be an even playing field for the rich and poor, where everyone can play. You shouldn't have to pay $100 for an online card if you dont want to. But until the laws of supply and demand are put in place, this is the game we live in.
I have money, I am a retired 23 year old. Most can't say that. But I am against buying cards. I believe you should innovate with what you have, and through that, it will lead to innovation in the game, and a better game for bots and people.
You can hope you will get changes to MTGO, but they still have to fix the shuffler and they should be on MAC. Any changes to the game are almost an impossibility unless people stop playing the current game. It seems the admins care more about whether or not your name is appropriate then if there is changes needed.
And it's funny. I wrote an article for this site about MTGO prices and they banned it because it shows how bots rip people off. I don't understand how you could possibly quantify prices when the prices are determined by bots, otherwise known as a "conflict of interest".
The funniest part of any MTGO card price is that the more the card gets used, the lower the price, which seems like the exact opposite of basic economics. And with no official numbers on how many cards are printed, prices are manipulated and therefor irrelevant.
I wish my article was allowed on this site because it shows how prices are quantified all wrong and there could be a real market instead of a fake market made up by the buyers and sellers. And the article also shows how bots very easily rip people off. Whether its a dollar here or there, their profit margins are ridiculous.
So how can you say there is a price when there is no supply numbers, no demand numbers, and the market is stagnant. How can you say there are changes in the price when if a card goes up or down, when dealing with a bot, you are still paying less than the value, and buying for more. So you are just giving a value to what you have, but not the actual market.
If you want to try to find my article on this site, search for "MTGO: Salvation".
But its fun ripping off the bots. During the releases nothing is better than a desperate bot. I sold 10 Swords of F&F for $25 because equilibrium was 12-15, 4 Thrun the Last Troll for a nice amount, and I sold my foiled rares for what looks like 3x the amount they are going for now.
Thanks for the all the positive feedback again. It's nice to know that people are reading and enjoying my articles. I hope I can continue to provide entertaining coverage of the Heirloom events.
But how much of that is the "me" generation that wants everything served to them on a silver platter with a minimal amount of sweat on their part, and how much of it is simple inability? There are programs and tutorials out there to help you get your own bot up and running. If people don't avail themselves of that it's because they either don't think it's worth it or are too lazy. Either way, I don't think it's a big problem of accessibility and I don't think it's a problem that necessarily needs fixing. Implementing a better Classifieds search function would go a long way to improving the usability of person-to-person exchange.
I guess I just think panning bots (not that you did, but others do oh so often) is such low-hanging fruit when in reality the serve a pretty good function.
The social contract is important online but to everyone that's entirely different, there's no actual way of enforcing this online to a great extent. Although some may block you, it isn't hard to find and play with others whom wholly endorse a combo deck. Online you're more than likely playing to win, because you don't know these people and have never met them you'll take no shame in beating them into the ground, whereas in real life you're looking for a good time between friends in a social environment.
I find a social contract entirely incomprehensible online unless stated within the game description in plain and simple terms, such examples "no cloudpost, eldrazi, planeswalkers, infect.." so on so forth. With these descriptors clearly stating what is acceptable and what isn't within that contract of that game terms are made clear otherwise you'll join a game play wasteland/plague stinger/jace beleren or even Liquimetal Coating (which I was told was too unfair once when I used it to destroy creatures) and find the social contract is in turmoil due to misunderstanding of what both players (Or more) wanted from that game. There are three culprits I see doing this in the casual room EVERY DAY. I can name them right now but I'm not entirely sure on the ethics of it.
Just as a more personal point, if someone was playing discard and heavy creature kill I would not block them, coming prepared to fight the strategies of your opponent is hardly unfair, he's packing discard? You should be packing a way to fight it (Regrowth, E-Witness, Grim Discovery, Relearn, Call to Mind, Miraculous Rebirth), I would feel the same for the lock, if you let him set it up then the rest of the table is to blame. If someone has Arcum Dagasson as their general and you let them tutor something incredibly stupid, that is entirely your fault.
I completely agree with you and feel that shard is way off base about the social contract not applying online.
This is jiving off topic a bit but I just want to add one more thing.
I agree with what you said, but let's be realistic here. A lot of users online would love to have a bot but don't have the time or the knowledge required to write them. The market would be better off if everyone could buy and sell cards on equal an footing, and there's no reason this can't happen. It would be better for the game and the market in the long run. How much of the MTGO population now do you think owns and operates a bot? Around 10%? ~10% of the population can trade cards at a fraction of a ticket. There is something wrong with that in my opinion.
As a hobbyist coder I can't disagree more. The algorithms used by MTGO reflect a random (if sometimes disagreeable) draw. If you and those whose anectdotal stories being referenced, are experiencing fluctuations in the draw that deviate vastly from the norm, all I can say is you probably have a great love life. :) I know from bad shuffling (irl it is so common it is disgusting) and I know from bad draws (again disgusting.)
The one thing I have observed (so anecdotal evidence only here) is that it(the shuffler) seems to start at a fixed index with a new deck list which means that your first few draws after building a list may seem very unrandom. It takes a few shuffles before the draws become "truly" random. Which is to say: shuffle up.
This is something WotC could fix by including a shuffle button at the pre play/draw stage of the game, but I doubt they consider it a problem at all much less something in need of a fix.
Meantime if you are having bad draws mulligan more aggressively, brush up on deck building (everyone can improve in this area), and ask others for their advice on your deck. It could be your curves are consistently too high for the meta you are in.
As per usual, well said.
I disagree that the social contract is unimportant online; nowhere else is it more important. It is exactly for the reasons you said that it is important to have a vague understanding of what the spirit of the format is. If you play a good amount of Commander on MTGO you'll quickly realize the pool of people who play it isn't that large. The same people will appear in games over and over. If you get a reputation as being a griefer, rude, or unfun, you'll either find people unwilling to play with you or yourself the target from the start. Doing one's best to keep the social contract in mind helps to ensure that the entire table has fun, not just one person.
And I didn't say this deck was particularly good or hard to stop, especially now that it's "out in the open" as you said. It's the spirit of the deck I was talking about, and the spirit is what I think is relevant. This deck certainly does not consider the opponents' enjoyment. It seeks to empty their hands and keep them that way. That's the difference between this lock and Myojin of Night's Reach. The Myojin empties everyone's hands and that can be annoying. But you start drawing cards as soon as your turn comes back around. You still get to do stuff the rest of the game. This deck tries to empty your hand, keep it empty, and then slowly kill you over 10 or more turns.
"How about this old guy who should be taking care of his kids instead of playing MTGO."
"Which is a gay name regardless"
Kewl dood. you can trollz on dem interwebz. U Am mah hero.
Anyway, back to the topic that ISN'T troll bait, there are plenty of tutorials and ways to make bots, and there is nothing to stop people from doing so. Often times the "human" labelled classifieds have buy prices below bots and sell prices higher than bots. A case in point is a hard to find Scent of Cinder promo, which is my favourite art. I found two in bots for 1.9 and 2.3 cents respectively, but I have only seen humans selling this card for 2-3 tickets. It's too easy to paint all bots as evil. They are what they are. No one in MTGO is altruistic and just handing out free tickets and everyone wants a good deal. Nothing wrong with that when you have the free will/choice to choose whatever bot/human you want.
Re: bots keeping the change... just buddy bots you have leftover credit from and use them the next time you want to buy some random stuff. Better to buy from them for regular market value than to lose that credit altogether.
judging how myojin of nights reach is one of the more popular cards in edh I think perhaps you are the one mistaking the social contract. Not to mention that there are three of you against him. if the three of you let him go off, you suck. especially now that the deck is out in the open.
the social contract also doesnt apply online since in edh, the main rule over all of it is that individual groups can edit it as they see fit. not all groups have banned emrakul and not all groups hate disvard or locks. on mtgo its hard to form such groups out side of making a clan. so if you join random games you are essentially agreeing to 3 random individuals interpretation of an already loosely phrased non binding contract. aka you get what you get.
If I played against this deck, I probably block you so I could avoid playing with you again. Heavy discard and creature kill plus a slow-to-kill lock? This is the ultimate griefer deck. You complain (with a condescending tone, I might add) about players going into "a raving fit about the evils of discard in a casual environment," but they are making completely valid complaints. If you're unfamiliar with it (and I suspect you might be), you should read about the concept of a "social contract" in EDH.
RE: adjusting your mic settings, if you don't like how it sounds after you record, you can filter with reverb filters and or others to see how that makes things sound.
If you run a hedge fund, you should be familiar with basic random numerical number generator. Pseudo-random number generators are "random enough"to the degree of 10ˆ31 using a widely used method. With the computing power these days, it's not even hard to code this up. The only problem could be from how mtgo labels individual cards and keeps track of it.
Just look up ran2 function from numerical recipes. hell. ran1 is enough for the sake of mtgo really.
Mtgo bot prices might not be the most fair price but it's much better than paying the paper price. Common to most rare cards are dirt cheap and mtgo is a incredibly cheap experience if you stick to budget cards. That's because of the drafters dumping their cards and tourney players picking out the top cards. Bots go in the middle and make profit. Also mtgo bot prices does somewhat run on supply and demand. People buy up high price rares much akin to future expectation of stocks.
Also, constructive criticism only please.
I am selfish, no doubt. I cop to it. Also I am not anti combo. I am anti infinite engine. If you can pull off a combo that doesn't go infinite I am all for it. I am not so happy about infinite (or arbitrarily large numbers of) turns for example. If you want to show you can break the game and make it unfun for everyone fine but don't expect me to be cheering.
Obvious trolls make me sad. What had to the days of people actually trying.
"How about this old guy who should be taking care of his kids instead of playing MTGO." I stopped reading right here. You "sir", are an a$$. Ad hominem arguments are absurd, useless and only go to show how witless you really are.
Nowhere was it ever said that someone who has kids can't have hobbies. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've read in Godot's articles that he's included his children in his hobby. You need to grow up and stop accosting people anonymously on the internet. This isn't 4chan and I, frankly, won't stand for this. You can go ahead and flame back all you want but the fact of the matter is Godot expressed his opinion and you just went ahead and baselessly mocked the man. You may disagree with him but he never said that you were a bad person,bad father or some other nonsense.
You need to grow up and get a life, something that Godot apparently does have...as evidenced by his family.
How about this old guy who should be taking care of his kids instead of playing MTGO. If you haven't noticed, there is a direct correlation between the use of a card and the price. You can look at the use of a card and the price going up or down, where down is the higher use of a card, and the higher is a lower use of a card.
And here is one simple way bots rip off people.
Bots sell in increments. That means that if they sell a card for anything outside of 1 ticket increments, you lose money. Like something that is 1.6 means that you are losing 0.40. Even if you deal in credits, a lot of people don't go to the same bot or can find the same bot.
And the article was banned. I was talking with the editor and he said it would be up to the owners of the trading website, and they didn't like it.
But the biggest thing, and the funniest thing GoDot? Which is a gay name regardless, the website that owns bots is also a price guide. That means they do things in their own interest, and not the interest of the people playing. And guess what, if you hurt your customers over the long run, they don't come back.
But that's cool. I only dropped out of college to open a hedge fund, something you could never say. So I know a little bit about economics, and from what I can see, this is a conflict of interest. It is as close to insider trading you could get in something that doesn't have an actual market.
Its very simple to quantify a market for a true price. Its more difficult to get that message out. I tried this website because it was established. I am not great at HTML, and I'm not great with making websites. It would be better because its already out there. Starting something new would take work, something I don't want to deal with because I have a life.
Paul, come on. Combo is a legitimate way to play this game that many players love. In real life at your kitchen table, if your opponent demonstrated an engine and said, "repeat that a million times," you wouldn't say, "No, you actually have to execute it manually with the cards," would you?
The lack of engine macros on MTGO shuts off an entire class of deck from viability online that is totally fine on paper, and that's a shame. You hate the idea of giving players the same tools to play a combo deck online that they have in real life, presumably because you don't like combo? That's just being selfish...how about supporting the idea of combo macros to further allow the online game to mirror the paper game, and then put "no combo, please" in your game comments. :)
JBK, you call into question your credibility right out of the gate by citing the need to "fix the shuffler." I would love to see your conclusive statistical research proving insufficient MTGO randomization.
Can you cite some examples of in increase in card use (how are you measuring that anyway?) leading to a decrease in price (that is not clearly attributable to another factor, such as new-set prices dying down as supply increases)? My observation has been that an increase in a card's demand due to the start of extended season or the card's inclusion in a hot new deck is that the price goes up, and I've speculated successfully many times based on that observation.
On the one hand you say bots rip people off, but then you gloat about ripping bots off. I would say a bot has only "ripped someone off" if they it successfully sells a card for way more than others are selling it for, or buys a card for much less than others are paying for it. In either case, the "victim" should have price checked more thoroughly.
If your logic in this post is indicative of your logic in your "banned article," perhaps it wasn't banned, but just rejected. Then again, maybe I just don't understand your summary in the comments, here. Why don't you put it up somewhere for us to see? Maybe if I read the whole thing your points would make sense. It would take under five minutes to start a blog, paste in your article, and give us a url...
Agree with a lot of the post above. Until we get a reasonable trading system in place where humans can trade fractions of a tickets, or set prices for items in their collection allowing for personalized, and/or AFK buying/selling to a larger degree, the classified section is going to remain one big mess.
I like the script ideas as well, but am not optimistic about seeing any changes anytime soon.
I think the cards do add up to 60 and 15 it's just the numbers at the bottom don't because the links to Mirrodin Beseiged cards aren't working yet. I imagine Pete put the links in manually but forgot to change the numbers at the bottom of each grouping.
Not sure I'm a massive fan of the affiliated deck idea, especially as you point out that Phyrexian decks are pretty limited to being Infect decks (which isn't even a Tier 1 deck). Congratulations on coming up with quite an innovative take on a Phyrexian deck though.
I'm sure the Suture Priest will be played with Soul's Attendant as a new take on Soul Sisters, but as you say I doubt it will be Tier-1, especially without Ranger of Eos.
I agree about the 1/1 in limited. The one I now have is paper, and only playable in casual games at the store, etc.
The list is missing some sideboard cards. Sideboard should have 2 Flashfreeze.
Maindeck is 60 cards, just that I forgot to correct the totals. The deck display widget does not yet recognize Besieged cards, so it does not hyperlink them or include them in the totals. I did drag them around, and add links, but forgot to fix the other cards total.
If you want to know the subtle tricks bots use and how to create a real price for MTGO cards, this article might help. If articles like this keep getting ignored, the game will die out. If articles like this are embraced, we can save the game.
This is because the game of Magic shouldn't be the battle of the rich, it should be an even playing field for the rich and poor, where everyone can play. You shouldn't have to pay $100 for an online card if you dont want to. But until the laws of supply and demand are put in place, this is the game we live in.
I have money, I am a retired 23 year old. Most can't say that. But I am against buying cards. I believe you should innovate with what you have, and through that, it will lead to innovation in the game, and a better game for bots and people.
You can hope you will get changes to MTGO, but they still have to fix the shuffler and they should be on MAC. Any changes to the game are almost an impossibility unless people stop playing the current game. It seems the admins care more about whether or not your name is appropriate then if there is changes needed.
And it's funny. I wrote an article for this site about MTGO prices and they banned it because it shows how bots rip people off. I don't understand how you could possibly quantify prices when the prices are determined by bots, otherwise known as a "conflict of interest".
The funniest part of any MTGO card price is that the more the card gets used, the lower the price, which seems like the exact opposite of basic economics. And with no official numbers on how many cards are printed, prices are manipulated and therefor irrelevant.
I wish my article was allowed on this site because it shows how prices are quantified all wrong and there could be a real market instead of a fake market made up by the buyers and sellers. And the article also shows how bots very easily rip people off. Whether its a dollar here or there, their profit margins are ridiculous.
So how can you say there is a price when there is no supply numbers, no demand numbers, and the market is stagnant. How can you say there are changes in the price when if a card goes up or down, when dealing with a bot, you are still paying less than the value, and buying for more. So you are just giving a value to what you have, but not the actual market.
If you want to try to find my article on this site, search for "MTGO: Salvation".
But its fun ripping off the bots. During the releases nothing is better than a desperate bot. I sold 10 Swords of F&F for $25 because equilibrium was 12-15, 4 Thrun the Last Troll for a nice amount, and I sold my foiled rares for what looks like 3x the amount they are going for now.
Thanks for the all the positive feedback again. It's nice to know that people are reading and enjoying my articles. I hope I can continue to provide entertaining coverage of the Heirloom events.