One thought. The deck is RecSur - but played like RecMulligan.
The fact that you saw zero Survivals all tournament probably has a lot to do with your results.
If you want some ideas on decks, check out my Ultimate Standard Tournament reports, over on Pastimes.net. Or find lots of old decklists in this Google document:
I do a lot of trading and have a few tips for bot users/traders
BOT sync - when dealing with a bot chain e.g. bot1, bot2, bot3 ensure you check that trade data has sync'd (if they share credits) before trading again. What often happens if you end one trade with say bot1 and go into a trade immediately with bot2 is the credits would not have synced back with the rest of the bots. As such you can end up 'short' on credits until (usually) you go into a new trade and the new balance has updated. Also should explain to the odd trader how a elusive 1 Tix credit at times appears on some bots account. SO for example you could have sold cards for .8 - but then go to bot2 and sell more for .2 - however as the credit has not sync'd you are only given .2 credit. Logging into a new trade later you balance reads 1 Tix (.8 that was not sync'd and the new .2).
BOT Prices are not always honest - I have come across some bots that allow repricing DURING a trade. These changes occurred after 'done' has been typed - so always double check the prices being confirmed to avoid being ripped off (you only have a chance to cancel the trade or confimr it at this point) - so be aware.
Likewise a lot of BOTs are coming/going from MTGO over time. I have recently discovered that 300 is the limit of buddies a user can have on MTGO v3 and as such I can see a lot of now 'dead' bots. My advice here is avoid leaving large credits on bots - simply as you run the risk of losing them if they ever go offline.
I have also seen bot's who have reset their balance of credits for people - this is something which may not matter to many people but the reality is a bot with 100 people with .4 tix credit average is the equivalent of writing of 40 Tix of other peoples money.
This really stems to a BOT is only as good as who made/administers/maintains it.
I make approx 50 - 100 tix a week thru trading - No BOT software ran by me or such - nor any classifieds/advertising or other such tools. It is a little bit of work but is proof that you can make a good return without needing to rely on third party software.
yeah, I was pretty surprised that i ended up at the bottom of the stack myself. I think I probably would've won that second round had I been able to do something game 3, then again he didn't really have a chance game 2 so who knows.
I feel like their were 2 big problems working against me:
1. The sideboard was designed for a different era of magic. I am not sure what my other options from the block were, but I do know I kept staring at the boils and hall of gemstone and sighing when I went to SB. I seriously debated siding in the furnaces sometimes just to be able to cycle instead of drawing some of the cards in my deck.
2. Land technology has come a long way since back in the day. Having to rely on Undiscovered Paradise and City of Brass was more than a little annoying. It was fine when the options were the same for everyone, but when people can use modern blocks to get more reasonable lands, I was a little behind. (see Tempest enemy duals vs. apoc or zen ones)
I think when I try again, I'll jump up a few years. See if that makes a difference.
I also recommend all his old stuff as he had some great deck ideas.
Next, I like the deck. I actually built a liquimetal coating deck myself a few weeks back when i first learned of the card.
4 Tuktuk Scrapper
2 Oxidda Scrapmelter
4 Liquimetal Coating
4 Acidic Slime
4 Manic Vandal
3 Viridian Revel
4 Ancient Stirrings
3 Shatter
3 Hoard-Smelter Dragon
2 Nature's Claim
3 Naturalize
6 Mounatain
10 Forest
4 Rootbound Crag
4 Copperline Gorge
I might actually need a burn spell or two, bu most people concede when you start naturalizing lands on turn 3
"Why is it that being Spikey is bad, when being Timmy or Johnny or Vorthos is good?"
It's not a matter of good or bad, but a matter of territory so to speak.
It's a sentiment that's hard to put into words but let me try.
Because Magic is a game of winners and losers at its core, it could easily be argued the Spike is the only one playing the game "right". Use the best cards in the best combination in order to win the game. And this is exactly the right attitude for tournament play. If Timmy shows up at a tournament with a sub par deck, but one thats full of cards he thinks are big and splashy and fun, he'll get his hat handed to him by Spike. The same goes for Johnny with his super cool combo tribal deck and Vorthos with his deck that he built to represent his favorite Harry Potter character. And Timmy, Johnny and Vorthos learn this lesson pretty quick and either stop playing tourneys or at least take on a Spikey attitude when they show up at FNM. They learn that what's "fun" at the kitchen table isn't as much "fun" in a premier event, for anyone really. And Spike doesn't like this intrusion on his territory either. Bad players in a tourney screw with the matchups, give players byes. Cost people MONEY. And since it does cost money to play tournaments, the non-spikes usually make their forays into Spike territory infrequent, and the good players learn to act accordingly when they are there.
What's the flip side? The flip side is the "Casual" room, and casual formats like EDH, or Tribal, or even standard. This is where Vorthos and Timmy and Johnny play, it's our territory. In Casual Land, it's ok to play my Bird deck even though I know it would get trounced by a Legacy Fish deck. When I start building a new commander deck I'm not focusing on beating the EDH metagame, I'm thinking about how kool it would be to conspire a Grab the Reigns on a Hamletback Goliath and then conspire a Heat shimmer to dupicate it and swing for a googleplex of damage. Or whatever, maybe my idea is really bad but I haven't seen it yet and won't until a play it a bit.
Now Spike is certainly welcome in our territory. Heck, we even have PRE's for Tribal and Commander and I expect these events to be Spikier than casual play.
So why does Spike have a bad reputation? I think it's primarily because there's no barrier to entry into Casual Land. If Timmy wants to play in tournaments he has to adjust his style or he's gonna lose money. He can't BE a Timmy in Tournament land. But Spike, he can log into the casual room any time he wants. There's no barrier to entry, as a matter of fact a good tourney player probably has a much more complete collection than most casual players, he can play most likely whatever he wants. And since he's a Spike he'll "Use the best cards in the best combination in order to win the game."
And without the outside pressure of expense, then there's no mechanism to move him in a casual direction the way Timmy and Johnny have to change in Tourney Land.
Let me be straightforward. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a Spike. In fact, Spikes in the casual room are a benefit because they raise the level of play, they introduce players to cards they might never have seen before, etc. It's just far more likely for Spike to ruin someones afternoon in the casual room than it is for Timmy and Johnny to screw up someones 8-4 Draft. That's where I believe a lot of the bad reputation of Spike comes from.
Wow, thats a wall of text. I should just write an article and get paid for that much text...
Let me conclude by saying that you make a lot of good points here. But tone is getting in the way of communicating them effectively.
Another caution against hiring a bot programmer for the present is that assuming a simple contract, if the client gets updated (v 4.0), your investment may be completely lost.
hehehe I like the example of buying an argentum armor, only to join the draft and win it :P how shady.. hahaha just kidding, i really enjoy how you share your opinions and market information, but the value of the information decreases with the number of peoiple reading it. so basically if you have something good, you really should keep it to yourself
From my own personal experience setting up my bots, I can tell you this: this is an *extremely* high risk business to start with, I cannot imagine a scenario in which it makes sense to create your own bot software, unless you intend to sell your software like MTGOLibrary does. You want a proven, stable platform, that is developed and improved on an ongoing basis. One little mistake, and you can lose thousands of dollars overnight.
The safest, and easiest, thing you can do is to run a bulk bot, ie one that buys and sells everything at a fixed price, like selling 100 commons for $1 etc. Just give yourself 100-200% markup, and don't even worry about selling cards below market value, since you make a profit regardless. You'll have those times where you'll sell Sphinx Sovereign for $.25 rather than $1, but only paid $.05 for it (this just happened to me the other day, although for me personally it was an oversight; I don't habitually check my bulk bot for *mythics* seeing as how this is the only one anybody's ever sold to it). But there are enough ways to shoot yourself in the foot without worrying about the software itself having bugs.
If you step beyond the bulk bot, I can tell you that your biggest risks are 1) reprints having wildly diverging prices (ie the MOR version of a card is $2 while the 10E version is $.10 or something and you accidentally put the MOR version on your bulk bot and sell it for $.10), 2) foils in general (my recommendation: avoid foils altogether unless you want to specialize in foils), and of course 3) prices crashing--I lost a good bit of money on Time Warp as it went from $15 to $2.
The specifics of your prices aren't too important, so long as you're making a profit. You don't need to offer the *best* prices; just reasonable prices. Far more important is your selection, and in particular having the hot, in demand STD cards. My bots trade more in EXT and Classic cards, and are therefore very low volume, because of course it's *hard* to get the good STD cards at prices where you'll make a profit. Don't forget your overhead: not only do you have the cost of buying or developing your bot software, you have the cost of servers and bandwidth etc, and the cost of cashing out Tix into real money. So, for example, let's say you buy a card for $1, and sell it for $1.50, you think you made $.50 right? Not so quick:
1) MTGOLibrary, for example, charges 2.5% of gross, both ways (ie buying and selling). So you pay $.025 on $1 and $.0375 on $1.50, which adds up to $.0625. Since your original "profit" was $.50, this is 12.5% of your "profit"! Ok, so now you're down to $.4375 in "profit" except that's in Tix.
2) You can get somewhere between $.85 and $.95 on the dollar when cashing out tix, depending on how you do it, and that's not counting potential losses to fraud. Lets say you manage ninety cents on the dollar, then your $.4375 (tix) is now $.39375 (real money).
3) Server overhead: for a while, I paid to have my bots hosted, and these kinds of things cost $20-$30/month for each bot you run. I had a really bad experience with this (avoid MTGOAdvantage, trust me), and now run my own server. Running your own server is ultimately much more economical, but requires some technical expertise setting it up. You can use a rinky dink machine, so long as you stuff a lot of RAM in the bugger, but you can get away with probably $500 for the machine, and if you're running multiple bots you'll need VMWare (or similar) which isn't too expensive. But lets just use $20/month as a baseline. If you have a pretty low-volume bot like I do, for round numbers lets say you have 500 trades per month, then that works out to $.04 per trade (in real money). Since buying and selling are two separate trades, your $.39375 is now $.31375.
4) Losses from bad trades and falling prices: even if you're on top of your game, you're gonna lose money here, unless you only run a bulk bot. I don't have a good way to quantify this, but I would say in the beginning you'll get hammered by this, and you have to be prepared to chalk it up to a learning experience.
5) Deadwood: you have some amount of stock that (may) never sell. You might sell it someday, but there's a certain risk in holding stock; not just falling prices, but also long-term stability of MTGO and WotC etc. This is a risk that can bite bulk bots that have 100 copies each of crap cards. This is where narrowing your margins to increase turnover can also decrease risk.
This just all goes to show, though, that you have to have decent margins just to break even--if you bought for $1 and sold for $1.15 in the previous scenario, you would just break even, ignoring losses and deadwood.
To get it all started, though, you need some inventory.
Stocking a bulk bot can be done reasonably cheaply. A couple hundred dollars and you can have a decent selection of crap cards across a bunch of sets. For a point of reference, I'm fairly middle of the road (I have more cards than some, less than others, higher prices than some, lower than others), and my bulk bot has roughly 40K (25K Commons, 10K Uncommon, 5K Rare) cards that I'm trying to sell for approximately $1000 (.01/.03/.10 each respectively), and it probably cost me $400-500 to acquire that stock. I have a very robust selection, though, and I started with maybe half of that--you can certainly start with less and just let your bot buy up stock. Personally, I limit my bulk bot to 8x of any given card to ensure I don't get stuck with dead wood that never sells. But if you're going for razor thin margins and high volume, then your equation could be very different.
For a full service bot, you'll need a couple thousand dollars worth of stock, at least, and it's much harder to acquire on the cheap. Just putting up an add that you're buying cards for typical "bot buying" prices in no way assures you that people will come sell you cards or that you could even profit if they did. The big boys can run thinner margins thanks to higher volume plus the fact that their infrastructure is already set up and paid for. Also, the big boys have $10-20K worth of stock, per bot (which they of course payed much less for), and their incredible selection generates a lot of business.
This all adds up to: the established players aren't too worried about you starting up a new bot and threatening their business. Odds are you'll buy up a bunch of cards (constricting supply/increasing demand), realize that the overhead destroys your profits and that it's too much work, give up, and sell out your stock to a big retailer after a few months.
One last thing: I don't know what bad things people have to say about MTGOLibrary, but their software runs more bots than any other software so far as I know, including several major "big boys".
now see if you had started there this would be a different conversation and not the first time someone had issue with the grading system so I guess it is only right I drop it and refocus the article to be as I said focused on the topic with the addition of my weekly performance being an addition and not a focus
I can vouch for MTGO Library. I began buying and selling cards when the only available sets were 7th, IPA and OTJ. I've used Cardshark, eBay, and several bots. I started using MTGO Library in March 2009, and I am still using it. If you just count MTGO Library, I have a total of 12,703 completed trades, breaking down to selling 64,992 cards and buying 155,450 cards.
That said, you do want to ensure the safety of your collection, no matter what bot you use: up to date antivirus, complex and changing passwords, and all windows updates. Also, keep an eye on your account, know when the bot is logged in and what it is doing.
Ultimately, if you are not comfortable leaving a stranger in control of your cards, do not use a bot.
No Bonesplitters, boo-hoo. Oops. I have egg on my face. At least I realized it as soon as I submitted!
In that case may I suggest you consider testing adventuring gear? It'd be slightly less consistent, and would probably make you want to move to 8 fetches. Considering the manabase of this deck, that might not be so very bad.
I was thinking about how a card like Bonesplitter would play out here. Most will not have a reasonable way to remove it main deck in this format. It can be bounced with Kor Skyfisher on turn 2, which is certainly useful to speed up your game. It upgrades all of your creatures into meaningful threats.
I am at this point a limited specialist of sorts(MTGO Draft Player of the Year 2010 - 18th place, MTGO Draft Player of t he Year 2009 - 2nd place). That said, I often found that cards like Sea-Gate Oracle in ROE limited, which is a format I achieved a high level of success in, would end up having a purely defensive role, protecting you while providing card advantage. In the late game the body would at some point often cease to be particularly meaningful. Against control builds in particular, it was very nice to have ways to enhance him with equipment to turn him into a meaningful attacker to add to my clock speed. Equipment on your guys, turning what would be fairly irrelevant bodies in the late game into one beatstick after another can tend to be a deciding factor.
To sum up, I suggest testing Bonesplitter as a reasonable 1 drop in a deck lacking in them, that will upgrade the card quality of any creature you have in play, doubling or tripling their clock speed and giving them the capacity to attack through or trade with larger creatures. Also, if you are on the play, t1 Bonesplitter, t2 Kor Skyfisher has got to be a strong line of play in this format. If your opponent is on a slow start the ability to go t3 Splitter/Equip bash, placing them on a 5 turn clock before they have done anything meaningful will lead to free wins combined with the direct damage angle of this deck.
Good week or bad week aside, my issue is that the whole process has only rules but no goal. Okay, we've seen what one person can do with $15 per week to spend on MTGO. That's interesting in and of itself in a way. But it'd be nice to see a clear-cut goal.
Return on Investment: 4 of 5 points
Draft Performance: 5 of 5 points
Earnings: 4 of 5 points
Improvement of Play: 4 of 5 points
Cards Collected: 3 of 5 points
The actual grading, then could reflect that:
Return on Investment: 1/5 $16 spent, only about $2 or less worth of cards actually opened.
Draft Performance: 3/5 In my mind, going infinite = 5/5. The first two drafts score well. The third is a flop.
Earnings: 1/5 considering you're pretty much 100% in the red. 5/5 if you count the packs as earnings, but since you busted them instead of selling them, they lost their true "earnings" value.
Improvement of Play: 4/5 fine, could even be 5/5 if you wanted.
Cards Collected: 2/5 - doesn't look like you collected much, if anything at all, that you couldn't get for $0.02 or cheaper from a bot. That being said, there is some progress in the sense that the collection is slowing moving towards building a Pauper deck.
During game 2 you should have sacrificed the fetchland pre-Foresee. That way you don't waste the card filtering. It is a small effect in this particular case since you only bottomed one land. That land is now randomly floating in your library however, instead of locked onto the bottom as something you may never draw. If you had a Foresee that revealed 4 lands, and you had bottomed them all, sacrificing your fetch after that would significantly hurt your future card quality.
I have to say that there ARE a lot of players that get upset when you disrupt their combo or you target them right away. If they build decks with certain commanders, or build decks around a specific combo they should expect to be targeted by the other players.
Actually there are methods to calculate your manabase (roughly, because nothing beats playtesting), I would like to point you towards two classic articles:
To be honest I still can't believe that you went 0-3 in the tournament with that deck. Which actually shows how much Magic has evolved since that deck was the king.
Regarding our match, I can say that I enjoyed it very much and you will read my side of the story in one month. I went 2-1 that day but sadly that score wasen't enough to take me to Top-4.
Good article! I enjoy the technical stuff. I know some people really hate bots. Hopefully this helps to humanize them a little bit. Think it them like the self-checkout isle at a supermarket. (And I know people who HATE those with passion, too.)
Hmmm food for thought, if I ever wanted to run a bot. This seemed pretty consistent with what I know and strangely I was doing some of the same research recently for a friend. Yeah I don't know how much credence I put into MLbot's shady behavior rumors/stories etc. There is a lot of cutthroat business going on and it is tough to sort the lies from the truths. Probably best to stay away from the topic. I will say MTGOtraders bots are always high performance, never kick you unless you idle and are always correct. I am not surprised that they are near the $10k mark for custom bots.
I was thinking if my friend ran into a brick wall finding a reliable bot source I might take a look at the bot scripting languages used and maybe give it a shot as I do know something about coding. But really it is probably best left to someone who's reputation is on the line and who may charge a premium for their services but will be competent enough to not leave you in the lurch security-wise etc.
One thought. The deck is RecSur - but played like RecMulligan.
The fact that you saw zero Survivals all tournament probably has a lot to do with your results.
If you want some ideas on decks, check out my Ultimate Standard Tournament reports, over on Pastimes.net. Or find lots of old decklists in this Google document:
https://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=0AYKcTcVVESOiZGRyODN4c18yY2preGpjZDI&h...
I have to say I am surprised not to see Lurking Predators. Predators comboed with Cream of the Crop rocks.
Interesting article
I do a lot of trading and have a few tips for bot users/traders
BOT sync - when dealing with a bot chain e.g. bot1, bot2, bot3 ensure you check that trade data has sync'd (if they share credits) before trading again. What often happens if you end one trade with say bot1 and go into a trade immediately with bot2 is the credits would not have synced back with the rest of the bots. As such you can end up 'short' on credits until (usually) you go into a new trade and the new balance has updated. Also should explain to the odd trader how a elusive 1 Tix credit at times appears on some bots account. SO for example you could have sold cards for .8 - but then go to bot2 and sell more for .2 - however as the credit has not sync'd you are only given .2 credit. Logging into a new trade later you balance reads 1 Tix (.8 that was not sync'd and the new .2).
BOT Prices are not always honest - I have come across some bots that allow repricing DURING a trade. These changes occurred after 'done' has been typed - so always double check the prices being confirmed to avoid being ripped off (you only have a chance to cancel the trade or confimr it at this point) - so be aware.
Likewise a lot of BOTs are coming/going from MTGO over time. I have recently discovered that 300 is the limit of buddies a user can have on MTGO v3 and as such I can see a lot of now 'dead' bots. My advice here is avoid leaving large credits on bots - simply as you run the risk of losing them if they ever go offline.
I have also seen bot's who have reset their balance of credits for people - this is something which may not matter to many people but the reality is a bot with 100 people with .4 tix credit average is the equivalent of writing of 40 Tix of other peoples money.
This really stems to a BOT is only as good as who made/administers/maintains it.
I make approx 50 - 100 tix a week thru trading - No BOT software ran by me or such - nor any classifieds/advertising or other such tools. It is a little bit of work but is proof that you can make a good return without needing to rely on third party software.
Good luck to all on your trades.
Thanks for the positive comments guys!
yeah, I was pretty surprised that i ended up at the bottom of the stack myself. I think I probably would've won that second round had I been able to do something game 3, then again he didn't really have a chance game 2 so who knows.
I feel like their were 2 big problems working against me:
1. The sideboard was designed for a different era of magic. I am not sure what my other options from the block were, but I do know I kept staring at the boils and hall of gemstone and sighing when I went to SB. I seriously debated siding in the furnaces sometimes just to be able to cycle instead of drawing some of the cards in my deck.
2. Land technology has come a long way since back in the day. Having to rely on Undiscovered Paradise and City of Brass was more than a little annoying. It was fine when the options were the same for everyone, but when people can use modern blocks to get more reasonable lands, I was a little behind. (see Tempest enemy duals vs. apoc or zen ones)
I think when I try again, I'll jump up a few years. See if that makes a difference.
Thank for the tip Paul. I know a couple of the images are kinda wonky. But now I know and that's half the battle.
Well you should love this then. Another writer at this site actually wrote a program for figuring out manabases and published an article about it
http://puremtgo.com/articles/explorations-22-simple-land-calculator
I also recommend all his old stuff as he had some great deck ideas.
Next, I like the deck. I actually built a liquimetal coating deck myself a few weeks back when i first learned of the card.
4 Tuktuk Scrapper
2 Oxidda Scrapmelter
4 Liquimetal Coating
4 Acidic Slime
4 Manic Vandal
3 Viridian Revel
4 Ancient Stirrings
3 Shatter
3 Hoard-Smelter Dragon
2 Nature's Claim
3 Naturalize
6 Mounatain
10 Forest
4 Rootbound Crag
4 Copperline Gorge
I might actually need a burn spell or two, bu most people concede when you start naturalizing lands on turn 3
Willing to trade one of my FOWs for a giant elephant made of jelly beans. PM me.
"Why is it that being Spikey is bad, when being Timmy or Johnny or Vorthos is good?"
It's not a matter of good or bad, but a matter of territory so to speak.
It's a sentiment that's hard to put into words but let me try.
Because Magic is a game of winners and losers at its core, it could easily be argued the Spike is the only one playing the game "right". Use the best cards in the best combination in order to win the game. And this is exactly the right attitude for tournament play. If Timmy shows up at a tournament with a sub par deck, but one thats full of cards he thinks are big and splashy and fun, he'll get his hat handed to him by Spike. The same goes for Johnny with his super cool combo tribal deck and Vorthos with his deck that he built to represent his favorite Harry Potter character. And Timmy, Johnny and Vorthos learn this lesson pretty quick and either stop playing tourneys or at least take on a Spikey attitude when they show up at FNM. They learn that what's "fun" at the kitchen table isn't as much "fun" in a premier event, for anyone really. And Spike doesn't like this intrusion on his territory either. Bad players in a tourney screw with the matchups, give players byes. Cost people MONEY. And since it does cost money to play tournaments, the non-spikes usually make their forays into Spike territory infrequent, and the good players learn to act accordingly when they are there.
What's the flip side? The flip side is the "Casual" room, and casual formats like EDH, or Tribal, or even standard. This is where Vorthos and Timmy and Johnny play, it's our territory. In Casual Land, it's ok to play my Bird deck even though I know it would get trounced by a Legacy Fish deck. When I start building a new commander deck I'm not focusing on beating the EDH metagame, I'm thinking about how kool it would be to conspire a Grab the Reigns on a Hamletback Goliath and then conspire a Heat shimmer to dupicate it and swing for a googleplex of damage. Or whatever, maybe my idea is really bad but I haven't seen it yet and won't until a play it a bit.
Now Spike is certainly welcome in our territory. Heck, we even have PRE's for Tribal and Commander and I expect these events to be Spikier than casual play.
So why does Spike have a bad reputation? I think it's primarily because there's no barrier to entry into Casual Land. If Timmy wants to play in tournaments he has to adjust his style or he's gonna lose money. He can't BE a Timmy in Tournament land. But Spike, he can log into the casual room any time he wants. There's no barrier to entry, as a matter of fact a good tourney player probably has a much more complete collection than most casual players, he can play most likely whatever he wants. And since he's a Spike he'll "Use the best cards in the best combination in order to win the game."
And without the outside pressure of expense, then there's no mechanism to move him in a casual direction the way Timmy and Johnny have to change in Tourney Land.
Let me be straightforward. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being a Spike. In fact, Spikes in the casual room are a benefit because they raise the level of play, they introduce players to cards they might never have seen before, etc. It's just far more likely for Spike to ruin someones afternoon in the casual room than it is for Timmy and Johnny to screw up someones 8-4 Draft. That's where I believe a lot of the bad reputation of Spike comes from.
Wow, thats a wall of text. I should just write an article and get paid for that much text...
Let me conclude by saying that you make a lot of good points here. But tone is getting in the way of communicating them effectively.
Another caution against hiring a bot programmer for the present is that assuming a simple contract, if the client gets updated (v 4.0), your investment may be completely lost.
hehehe I like the example of buying an argentum armor, only to join the draft and win it :P how shady.. hahaha just kidding, i really enjoy how you share your opinions and market information, but the value of the information decreases with the number of peoiple reading it. so basically if you have something good, you really should keep it to yourself
From my own personal experience setting up my bots, I can tell you this: this is an *extremely* high risk business to start with, I cannot imagine a scenario in which it makes sense to create your own bot software, unless you intend to sell your software like MTGOLibrary does. You want a proven, stable platform, that is developed and improved on an ongoing basis. One little mistake, and you can lose thousands of dollars overnight.
The safest, and easiest, thing you can do is to run a bulk bot, ie one that buys and sells everything at a fixed price, like selling 100 commons for $1 etc. Just give yourself 100-200% markup, and don't even worry about selling cards below market value, since you make a profit regardless. You'll have those times where you'll sell Sphinx Sovereign for $.25 rather than $1, but only paid $.05 for it (this just happened to me the other day, although for me personally it was an oversight; I don't habitually check my bulk bot for *mythics* seeing as how this is the only one anybody's ever sold to it). But there are enough ways to shoot yourself in the foot without worrying about the software itself having bugs.
If you step beyond the bulk bot, I can tell you that your biggest risks are 1) reprints having wildly diverging prices (ie the MOR version of a card is $2 while the 10E version is $.10 or something and you accidentally put the MOR version on your bulk bot and sell it for $.10), 2) foils in general (my recommendation: avoid foils altogether unless you want to specialize in foils), and of course 3) prices crashing--I lost a good bit of money on Time Warp as it went from $15 to $2.
The specifics of your prices aren't too important, so long as you're making a profit. You don't need to offer the *best* prices; just reasonable prices. Far more important is your selection, and in particular having the hot, in demand STD cards. My bots trade more in EXT and Classic cards, and are therefore very low volume, because of course it's *hard* to get the good STD cards at prices where you'll make a profit. Don't forget your overhead: not only do you have the cost of buying or developing your bot software, you have the cost of servers and bandwidth etc, and the cost of cashing out Tix into real money. So, for example, let's say you buy a card for $1, and sell it for $1.50, you think you made $.50 right? Not so quick:
1) MTGOLibrary, for example, charges 2.5% of gross, both ways (ie buying and selling). So you pay $.025 on $1 and $.0375 on $1.50, which adds up to $.0625. Since your original "profit" was $.50, this is 12.5% of your "profit"! Ok, so now you're down to $.4375 in "profit" except that's in Tix.
2) You can get somewhere between $.85 and $.95 on the dollar when cashing out tix, depending on how you do it, and that's not counting potential losses to fraud. Lets say you manage ninety cents on the dollar, then your $.4375 (tix) is now $.39375 (real money).
3) Server overhead: for a while, I paid to have my bots hosted, and these kinds of things cost $20-$30/month for each bot you run. I had a really bad experience with this (avoid MTGOAdvantage, trust me), and now run my own server. Running your own server is ultimately much more economical, but requires some technical expertise setting it up. You can use a rinky dink machine, so long as you stuff a lot of RAM in the bugger, but you can get away with probably $500 for the machine, and if you're running multiple bots you'll need VMWare (or similar) which isn't too expensive. But lets just use $20/month as a baseline. If you have a pretty low-volume bot like I do, for round numbers lets say you have 500 trades per month, then that works out to $.04 per trade (in real money). Since buying and selling are two separate trades, your $.39375 is now $.31375.
4) Losses from bad trades and falling prices: even if you're on top of your game, you're gonna lose money here, unless you only run a bulk bot. I don't have a good way to quantify this, but I would say in the beginning you'll get hammered by this, and you have to be prepared to chalk it up to a learning experience.
5) Deadwood: you have some amount of stock that (may) never sell. You might sell it someday, but there's a certain risk in holding stock; not just falling prices, but also long-term stability of MTGO and WotC etc. This is a risk that can bite bulk bots that have 100 copies each of crap cards. This is where narrowing your margins to increase turnover can also decrease risk.
This just all goes to show, though, that you have to have decent margins just to break even--if you bought for $1 and sold for $1.15 in the previous scenario, you would just break even, ignoring losses and deadwood.
To get it all started, though, you need some inventory.
Stocking a bulk bot can be done reasonably cheaply. A couple hundred dollars and you can have a decent selection of crap cards across a bunch of sets. For a point of reference, I'm fairly middle of the road (I have more cards than some, less than others, higher prices than some, lower than others), and my bulk bot has roughly 40K (25K Commons, 10K Uncommon, 5K Rare) cards that I'm trying to sell for approximately $1000 (.01/.03/.10 each respectively), and it probably cost me $400-500 to acquire that stock. I have a very robust selection, though, and I started with maybe half of that--you can certainly start with less and just let your bot buy up stock. Personally, I limit my bulk bot to 8x of any given card to ensure I don't get stuck with dead wood that never sells. But if you're going for razor thin margins and high volume, then your equation could be very different.
For a full service bot, you'll need a couple thousand dollars worth of stock, at least, and it's much harder to acquire on the cheap. Just putting up an add that you're buying cards for typical "bot buying" prices in no way assures you that people will come sell you cards or that you could even profit if they did. The big boys can run thinner margins thanks to higher volume plus the fact that their infrastructure is already set up and paid for. Also, the big boys have $10-20K worth of stock, per bot (which they of course payed much less for), and their incredible selection generates a lot of business.
This all adds up to: the established players aren't too worried about you starting up a new bot and threatening their business. Odds are you'll buy up a bunch of cards (constricting supply/increasing demand), realize that the overhead destroys your profits and that it's too much work, give up, and sell out your stock to a big retailer after a few months.
One last thing: I don't know what bad things people have to say about MTGOLibrary, but their software runs more bots than any other software so far as I know, including several major "big boys".
"the whole process has only rules but no goal."
now see if you had started there this would be a different conversation and not the first time someone had issue with the grading system so I guess it is only right I drop it and refocus the article to be as I said focused on the topic with the addition of my weekly performance being an addition and not a focus
I can vouch for MTGO Library. I began buying and selling cards when the only available sets were 7th, IPA and OTJ. I've used Cardshark, eBay, and several bots. I started using MTGO Library in March 2009, and I am still using it. If you just count MTGO Library, I have a total of 12,703 completed trades, breaking down to selling 64,992 cards and buying 155,450 cards.
That said, you do want to ensure the safety of your collection, no matter what bot you use: up to date antivirus, complex and changing passwords, and all windows updates. Also, keep an eye on your account, know when the bot is logged in and what it is doing.
Ultimately, if you are not comfortable leaving a stranger in control of your cards, do not use a bot.
-STANDARD- Pauper.
No Bonesplitters, boo-hoo. Oops. I have egg on my face. At least I realized it as soon as I submitted!
In that case may I suggest you consider testing adventuring gear? It'd be slightly less consistent, and would probably make you want to move to 8 fetches. Considering the manabase of this deck, that might not be so very bad.
I was thinking about how a card like Bonesplitter would play out here. Most will not have a reasonable way to remove it main deck in this format. It can be bounced with Kor Skyfisher on turn 2, which is certainly useful to speed up your game. It upgrades all of your creatures into meaningful threats.
I am at this point a limited specialist of sorts(MTGO Draft Player of the Year 2010 - 18th place, MTGO Draft Player of t he Year 2009 - 2nd place). That said, I often found that cards like Sea-Gate Oracle in ROE limited, which is a format I achieved a high level of success in, would end up having a purely defensive role, protecting you while providing card advantage. In the late game the body would at some point often cease to be particularly meaningful. Against control builds in particular, it was very nice to have ways to enhance him with equipment to turn him into a meaningful attacker to add to my clock speed. Equipment on your guys, turning what would be fairly irrelevant bodies in the late game into one beatstick after another can tend to be a deciding factor.
To sum up, I suggest testing Bonesplitter as a reasonable 1 drop in a deck lacking in them, that will upgrade the card quality of any creature you have in play, doubling or tripling their clock speed and giving them the capacity to attack through or trade with larger creatures. Also, if you are on the play, t1 Bonesplitter, t2 Kor Skyfisher has got to be a strong line of play in this format. If your opponent is on a slow start the ability to go t3 Splitter/Equip bash, placing them on a 5 turn clock before they have done anything meaningful will lead to free wins combined with the direct damage angle of this deck.
I suggest testing 2-3 copies.
Thanks for writing.
Good week or bad week aside, my issue is that the whole process has only rules but no goal. Okay, we've seen what one person can do with $15 per week to spend on MTGO. That's interesting in and of itself in a way. But it'd be nice to see a clear-cut goal.
Return on Investment: 4 of 5 points
Draft Performance: 5 of 5 points
Earnings: 4 of 5 points
Improvement of Play: 4 of 5 points
Cards Collected: 3 of 5 points
The actual grading, then could reflect that:
Return on Investment: 1/5 $16 spent, only about $2 or less worth of cards actually opened.
Draft Performance: 3/5 In my mind, going infinite = 5/5. The first two drafts score well. The third is a flop.
Earnings: 1/5 considering you're pretty much 100% in the red. 5/5 if you count the packs as earnings, but since you busted them instead of selling them, they lost their true "earnings" value.
Improvement of Play: 4/5 fine, could even be 5/5 if you wanted.
Cards Collected: 2/5 - doesn't look like you collected much, if anything at all, that you couldn't get for $0.02 or cheaper from a bot. That being said, there is some progress in the sense that the collection is slowing moving towards building a Pauper deck.
Total Grade: 12/50 - F
During game 2 you should have sacrificed the fetchland pre-Foresee. That way you don't waste the card filtering. It is a small effect in this particular case since you only bottomed one land. That land is now randomly floating in your library however, instead of locked onto the bottom as something you may never draw. If you had a Foresee that revealed 4 lands, and you had bottomed them all, sacrificing your fetch after that would significantly hurt your future card quality.
-Michael
I have to say that there ARE a lot of players that get upset when you disrupt their combo or you target them right away. If they build decks with certain commanders, or build decks around a specific combo they should expect to be targeted by the other players.
Hah, good question. Well, I'm hoping to maybe get a follow-up interview after Mirrodin Besieged releases. Maybe I'll add that to the list :)
I like replies like these, and that's what makes this place so good!
Dan
Not that I'm aware of.
Actually there are methods to calculate your manabase (roughly, because nothing beats playtesting), I would like to point you towards two classic articles:
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/890.html
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/tf87
Sadly the wizards site is currently down, but check those out.
Good Luck and Have Fun.
Great report, I enjoyed it.
To be honest I still can't believe that you went 0-3 in the tournament with that deck. Which actually shows how much Magic has evolved since that deck was the king.
Regarding our match, I can say that I enjoyed it very much and you will read my side of the story in one month. I went 2-1 that day but sadly that score wasen't enough to take me to Top-4.
Good luck in your future tournaments.
LE
Good article! I enjoy the technical stuff. I know some people really hate bots. Hopefully this helps to humanize them a little bit. Think it them like the self-checkout isle at a supermarket. (And I know people who HATE those with passion, too.)
Hmmm food for thought, if I ever wanted to run a bot. This seemed pretty consistent with what I know and strangely I was doing some of the same research recently for a friend. Yeah I don't know how much credence I put into MLbot's shady behavior rumors/stories etc. There is a lot of cutthroat business going on and it is tough to sort the lies from the truths. Probably best to stay away from the topic. I will say MTGOtraders bots are always high performance, never kick you unless you idle and are always correct. I am not surprised that they are near the $10k mark for custom bots.
I was thinking if my friend ran into a brick wall finding a reliable bot source I might take a look at the bot scripting languages used and maybe give it a shot as I do know something about coding. But really it is probably best left to someone who's reputation is on the line and who may charge a premium for their services but will be competent enough to not leave you in the lurch security-wise etc.