Interesting breakdown. I haven't played 100cs in ages because my collection no longer has some of the critical staples. It would be nice if your breakdown included some remarks on plausible or reasonable budget replacements for things like Survival (Fauna Shaman?) The swords (Loxodon Warhammer?) and more. Thanks for the interesting read.
If you are buying/trading for cards in a low demand format expecting them to rise later in value after a format shift, I think it's safe to say these cards you're acquiring are sleeper cards. If you don't focus on specific ones, do you just load up on everything?
You're right, and it's really just my opinion. Me and my wife do play MMO's, but we're under no illusion that all of digital assets are our own. Still, we play often, collect novelty items in game, collect mounts, etc. The difference in my mind, and I know this can be argued all day, is that our investment to progress in game is purely that of time (Yes, yes, and a monthly "rental" fee).
Whiffy made the point that he, and others, make a sizable return on their investments, and that's all well and good, however I still don't call that collecting. Yes, you do amass a collection in playing that way, but when there's the ever-looming (No matter how unlikely) possibility that it can all be taken away from you at a moment's notice, I just can't call it collecting.
I agree with everything you said except one thing:
1) I think you mentioned how you or your wife/girlfriend (or both, I can't remember sorry, I have such a terrible short-term memory) play MMOs, hence you should know that in almost any MMO that featured useless but rare and collectible/fashion items, usually the most rare of those items are among the top "priced" (in game currency of course) things in that game.
I was among one of those always looking for some "bargain" collectible in game markets, I had an extensive cactus collection in ultima online etc etc.
I am a collector at heart and I tend to collect things that come in different "flavors" (used to collect stamps, coins etc.) so I keep eyeing the "promo" tab of my collection and I like when I can get an alternate art card. The only thing that stops me from actually collecting my leftover cards is just my budget.
Paying real money for the cards and not just some in game currency surely discourage collecting a bit but I don't think that will stop too many players from actively collecting cards.
1. your insane. med1 sucked sure. it was there first attempt, and if they had did it in v3 we would have 45 dollar fow. med2 was ligtyears better but still kind of a pain in my butt. You dont even mention med3 which was almost a roe limited invironment compared to med 1 and 2.
2. it will take exactly 1 hour to find out about bots. your insane if you think this is a real problem. also, wah, wah, my cards cost money? omfg i cant believe i have to pay 70 a pop for fow. oh wait,? thats only if i want to win back the cost of them in events? well ill still cry about it.
3. this is the only one i semi agree with. i would like to see reprints of cards from alpha through iceage with origanal arts. nothing after that though.
4. $%&$ you, my cards arnt worth anything? why then have i been able to pull out over 1700 usd cash from my "digital objects" just cause you think its silly dosent mean others do.
if your gonna write bout something do some research. Maybe even "gasp" talk to people who drafted all 3 sets.
Hi Kuma :) I am sorry but your friend is misinformed. I have checked the library quite often as I am usually looking for a lower price than I can find in classifieds and some bots listed are never online and many others do not carry the stock listed or do not have them at the prices listed. In fact that is the biggest beef I have with the library useful as it is still, I check them and usually only a handful of bots listed are reliable resources. The others almost always tend to be lame ducks.
MTGOtradersBot is almost always willing to sell a particular card and usually if not the store has it. I find often they have cards no one else has and if not the lowest price then 99% of the time no where near the highest price. It can take time to find bots not on the libraries list that have lower prices or are giving higher payout for cards. Hours is not unreasonable in some cases, particularly with promo cards or special editions (theme decks, etc.)
Have you considered mimic vat in the infect deck? Mimic vatting ichor rats is full of win, and corpse cur is similarly good. In fact, pretty much any infector on there is good. I haven't played about *too* much with the infect deck, but i like vat a lot more than skittles, who I think just ups your curve too much. Livewire lash is insane, so I'd probably test cutting skittles for a few mimic vats, as a test at the least!
EDIT: also, this ups your artifact count by 40% so that painsmith might actually become pretty good. That said, I'm not convinced by painsmith. The only way you're ever going to get a turn 3 pump+swing from her is turn 2 infector followed by turn 3 painsmith and infiltration lens. You're never going to want to drop it on turn 2. I guess you can also use it to try to trigger livewire lash once the board's gummed up, but that seems like you'd need a lot of specific cards.
4) I agree, sorry Blau :(. The point of MED is to give us cards that haven't and wont be printed on MTGO. Basically, Alpha - Ice Age.
3) Also agree sorta. I don't want to make the stereotype that most paper Legacy players have been playing paper Legacy for years and the MTGO environment feels out of place and "uncomfortable" to them... but I just did.
2) Sure, why not.
1) This is the point where I disagree. In the "collectible" sense Paper Magic != MTGO. I completely disagree with the online secondary market. You realize we don't OWN a single thing online? IMHO, you can't collect something you don't own.
I think that instead of giving the finger to the secondary market, you should give it to the redemption service. Don't can it, but limit it to Standard sets. Do that, and stop pulling crap off the online store!
IF (big IF) Wotc is going to stretch out the Master's Edition sets past 4, then I believe they will need to resort to reprinting some cards in order to make the limited and constructed appeal of the set strong enough to attract players.
Master Edition 3 (ME3) was a definite change of pace from Master's Edition 1 (ME1). There were a lot more chase cards in ME3 and the limited appeal of the set was reasonable and probably comparable to Tenth Edition in terms of limited playability. It was successful because of the chase rares and the fact that it didn't totally suck to draft. ME1 was not designed to be drafted alone. It looked like they were originally planning to group Master's Editions with the core set, but that idea didn't really work out.
WotC can go one of two ways. Create ME4 in a similar manner to ME3 and then be done with making Master's Edition sets as all of the good cards will be released, or it can try to make ME4, ME5, and maybe ME6 and fill in the gaps with reprinted playable chase cards and reprinted limited filler. I think either option is viable.
Reprinting only chase cards would not go over well with a lot of players and it defeats the primary purpose of Master's Editions. I agree with Endless on this one.
1: You can't call it a collectible card game, and then poop on the people who choose to collect cards
2: MED3 was a smashing success
3: Are you really so stunned as to believe a paper legacy player wouldn't be able to figure out how to get digital cards? It's not like he's been cracking packs of each set he wants to get cards from to acquire his staples. He buys from online or trades, both of which are available on mtgo.
4: You obviously don't understand even the most basic premise of the MED series. I'll spell it out to you. They wanted to release cards that haven't and won't see online release. The majority of your dream list for med4 has already been released.
Like I said, I don't try to speculate on specific sleeper cards. It's more of a matter of just paying attention to what format is in low demand and what format is in high demand. I don't play constructed really at all on MTGO, so I don't know what the relevant format is.
It's worth noting that trading is much harder on MTGO in general than it is IRL. There are several reasons for this, some of which Pete touched on (such as the fact there is nearly limitless inventory available for trade/sale -- you're never going to be the only guy in the room with a particular card). There also just isn't as big of a trading culture online as there is IRL, at least that I'm aware of. There used to be a lot more casual trading in the early days but now not so much as bots are so reliable.
Also, it's a lot easier to "go infinite" online without trading than it is IRL. Online, if you have the skill you can win tournaments, earn packs, and sell those packs for good value. Constructed cards are generally cheaper online than IRL, and packs are more expensive. So it's easy to convert your unopened prize into whatever cards you need without trading card for card. IRL, however, it's much harder to get good value for packs because so many people have access to them at wholesale prices. Simply cracking the packs is bad odds too if you are looking for specific cards. So if you want to get the cards you need without actually paying cash for them, your best bet is to trade card for card.
With that sealed pool, I think I would consider mainly artifacts, and just splash red and white for the 4 removal spells. This might even make Golem Foundry useful!
Alternatively, you can go blue plus artifacts and splash the removal package from red, white, or green as needed for each match. I have never seen so much playable blue in sealed.
In your P2P2, you pick up a mana leak over a magma phoenix (amongst other stuff), this is probably fine if you have a few good blue cards from your first pack, but I don't think you really had much. As it happens the rest of P2 sent you loads of exciting red, so that could have worked out pretty well for you. Obviously I'm saying this in full knowledge of what you were going to receive in the future, but I do think you maybe got "blue goes with white!" stuck in your head a little bit too early. I think I'd've taken the risk on the phoenix, buit I can totally understand why you didn't.
As for the scars pool; er, I don't really know!
I'm not very interested in your red, which seems to be shatter+blast+nothing much.
Your white has two removal spells, and a couple of fliers, but you don't have anything obvious to return with glint hawk, so it doesn't overexcite me.
Black is half infect and half not, with little removal, so I'd probably ignore it.
Green has a couple of tricks, two cantripping removal spells (+sylvok replica), and 2-3 reasonable guys
Your blue looks very solid.
I'd definitely be running blue, probably along with green, and I might consider splashing for the two white removal spells (definitely would if you had a horizon spellbomb). Then I'd run pretty much all of your artifact creatures, flight spellbombs and the +0/+3 vigilance equipment.
I'm interested to see how you built this pool, as I'm not at all sure that my suggestion is correct!
I'm from Poland and there is 2$ per hour minimal wage. So you doing 3 tix over hour is better than flipping burgers in my country. Pretty sad don't you think ? :P
Hi guys and thanks for the comments. Just a warning: Do not try the Mindslaver deck in the Casual Room. I think I got myself blocked by a dozen of players last night :(.
But in case you wonder, that deck is really a blast to play. It locks the opponent very frequently with Mindslaver, and if not, a 6/6 deathtouch-lifelink wurm every turn is not something many decks can handle.
Well, MTGO Library does feature a lot of "false positives", that's true, but you just learn to ignore them, the names of those BOTs are always very unusual to begin with, since they are no more active (also, a friend of mine has a BOT with them, and he told me they take out the BOTs who don't get online anymore after a short while, so they can't be months or years old, at least theoretically. The price chart of each single BOT is updated as soon as it goes online). You just have to focus on the couple of dozen BOTs you know well and see often, but I have no problem with that. After every draft, I just check my eventual big cards there, then make a try at MTGOTradersBuyBot, and within 5 minutes I'm happily done. Surely I don't need many hours like the article said. I'm saying so just to point out how it works, I don't think that could change the basic assumptions of the article in any way.
Trinket Mage is pretty much a must for this deck I think.
Although blue isn't needed for the Liquimetal Coating deck, if you're intending to go with the 'destroy any permanent' theme. My version's G/W and it seems to work well enough. Most people go red though.
precurser golem + twisted image. yes its ancesrtal recall. saw a guy do it to me yesterday. was actually savage. he played 2 ancestrals and attacked with 1/4 switching it to 4/1 on me in the match.
Honestly, I'm a net decker myself and can admit it. Deckbuilding has never been a strong point of mine and I think it really does take a lot of skill to develop a deck that can dominate a format. Although I do netdeck, I will take the time to learn/play a deck to see if I like it and then test out other cards I think may be a good fit. Looking at the metagame as a whole gives you an opportunity to modify as you see fit.
I haven't been playing much standard the last few weeks but I'm starting to miss it and will probably start playing in some events again.
Wow...that has got to be THE best resource for someone in my situation.
I only play MTGO, no cards, and I have very little time for reading up on MTG.
I do create my own decks often, though they are mostly Tier 2, and end up in the casual room.
I do, however, enjoy competitive standard, and play in tournaments when I can.
I net deck like mad. I have no problem admiting that. Being able to check in on what is out there, and what is winning is invaluable to me. What I usually end up doing, is to pick my archetype, check out all the decks I can of that type, and then create a slightly modified version built to my taste. I am sure that is not at all unusual, but maybe admiting is.
Wanted to say that I really enjoyed the decks you highlighted in the last two articles as many of the lists seem pretty close to optimum and there is a great variety as well.
There will be some interest in block, especially for those players that are looking for something different to play besides legacy/extended events which don't seem to fire all that much. The entry point of block is usually always lower than standard. Last season I couldn't justify investing a few hundred dollars into a standard deck when i started playing but i could justify the price of a block deck like Boros which was cheap to build and could be competitive. There will be premier events for block on the weekends (similar to standard) and daily events everyday, although the block events don't draw as many people as the standard events do. Overall, I think block is a good starting point for a player looking to get into the occasional tournament without spending a fortune.
Interesting breakdown. I haven't played 100cs in ages because my collection no longer has some of the critical staples. It would be nice if your breakdown included some remarks on plausible or reasonable budget replacements for things like Survival (Fauna Shaman?) The swords (Loxodon Warhammer?) and more. Thanks for the interesting read.
If you are buying/trading for cards in a low demand format expecting them to rise later in value after a format shift, I think it's safe to say these cards you're acquiring are sleeper cards. If you don't focus on specific ones, do you just load up on everything?
You're right, and it's really just my opinion. Me and my wife do play MMO's, but we're under no illusion that all of digital assets are our own. Still, we play often, collect novelty items in game, collect mounts, etc. The difference in my mind, and I know this can be argued all day, is that our investment to progress in game is purely that of time (Yes, yes, and a monthly "rental" fee).
Whiffy made the point that he, and others, make a sizable return on their investments, and that's all well and good, however I still don't call that collecting. Yes, you do amass a collection in playing that way, but when there's the ever-looming (No matter how unlikely) possibility that it can all be taken away from you at a moment's notice, I just can't call it collecting.
I agree with everything you said except one thing:
1) I think you mentioned how you or your wife/girlfriend (or both, I can't remember sorry, I have such a terrible short-term memory) play MMOs, hence you should know that in almost any MMO that featured useless but rare and collectible/fashion items, usually the most rare of those items are among the top "priced" (in game currency of course) things in that game.
I was among one of those always looking for some "bargain" collectible in game markets, I had an extensive cactus collection in ultima online etc etc.
I am a collector at heart and I tend to collect things that come in different "flavors" (used to collect stamps, coins etc.) so I keep eyeing the "promo" tab of my collection and I like when I can get an alternate art card. The only thing that stops me from actually collecting my leftover cards is just my budget.
Paying real money for the cards and not just some in game currency surely discourage collecting a bit but I don't think that will stop too many players from actively collecting cards.
IMHO.
1. your insane. med1 sucked sure. it was there first attempt, and if they had did it in v3 we would have 45 dollar fow. med2 was ligtyears better but still kind of a pain in my butt. You dont even mention med3 which was almost a roe limited invironment compared to med 1 and 2.
2. it will take exactly 1 hour to find out about bots. your insane if you think this is a real problem. also, wah, wah, my cards cost money? omfg i cant believe i have to pay 70 a pop for fow. oh wait,? thats only if i want to win back the cost of them in events? well ill still cry about it.
3. this is the only one i semi agree with. i would like to see reprints of cards from alpha through iceage with origanal arts. nothing after that though.
4. $%&$ you, my cards arnt worth anything? why then have i been able to pull out over 1700 usd cash from my "digital objects" just cause you think its silly dosent mean others do.
if your gonna write bout something do some research. Maybe even "gasp" talk to people who drafted all 3 sets.
i hate that i spent time reading this.
Hi Kuma :) I am sorry but your friend is misinformed. I have checked the library quite often as I am usually looking for a lower price than I can find in classifieds and some bots listed are never online and many others do not carry the stock listed or do not have them at the prices listed. In fact that is the biggest beef I have with the library useful as it is still, I check them and usually only a handful of bots listed are reliable resources. The others almost always tend to be lame ducks.
MTGOtradersBot is almost always willing to sell a particular card and usually if not the store has it. I find often they have cards no one else has and if not the lowest price then 99% of the time no where near the highest price. It can take time to find bots not on the libraries list that have lower prices or are giving higher payout for cards. Hours is not unreasonable in some cases, particularly with promo cards or special editions (theme decks, etc.)
Have you considered mimic vat in the infect deck? Mimic vatting ichor rats is full of win, and corpse cur is similarly good. In fact, pretty much any infector on there is good. I haven't played about *too* much with the infect deck, but i like vat a lot more than skittles, who I think just ups your curve too much. Livewire lash is insane, so I'd probably test cutting skittles for a few mimic vats, as a test at the least!
EDIT: also, this ups your artifact count by 40% so that painsmith might actually become pretty good. That said, I'm not convinced by painsmith. The only way you're ever going to get a turn 3 pump+swing from her is turn 2 infector followed by turn 3 painsmith and infiltration lens. You're never going to want to drop it on turn 2. I guess you can also use it to try to trigger livewire lash once the board's gummed up, but that seems like you'd need a lot of specific cards.
4) I agree, sorry Blau :(. The point of MED is to give us cards that haven't and wont be printed on MTGO. Basically, Alpha - Ice Age.
3) Also agree sorta. I don't want to make the stereotype that most paper Legacy players have been playing paper Legacy for years and the MTGO environment feels out of place and "uncomfortable" to them... but I just did.
2) Sure, why not.
1) This is the point where I disagree. In the "collectible" sense Paper Magic != MTGO. I completely disagree with the online secondary market. You realize we don't OWN a single thing online? IMHO, you can't collect something you don't own.
I think that instead of giving the finger to the secondary market, you should give it to the redemption service. Don't can it, but limit it to Standard sets. Do that, and stop pulling crap off the online store!
I had a similar but less drastic idea like this back in March, http://puremtgo.com/articles/format-snapshot-7-standard-zendikar-block-a...
IF (big IF) Wotc is going to stretch out the Master's Edition sets past 4, then I believe they will need to resort to reprinting some cards in order to make the limited and constructed appeal of the set strong enough to attract players.
Master Edition 3 (ME3) was a definite change of pace from Master's Edition 1 (ME1). There were a lot more chase cards in ME3 and the limited appeal of the set was reasonable and probably comparable to Tenth Edition in terms of limited playability. It was successful because of the chase rares and the fact that it didn't totally suck to draft. ME1 was not designed to be drafted alone. It looked like they were originally planning to group Master's Editions with the core set, but that idea didn't really work out.
WotC can go one of two ways. Create ME4 in a similar manner to ME3 and then be done with making Master's Edition sets as all of the good cards will be released, or it can try to make ME4, ME5, and maybe ME6 and fill in the gaps with reprinted playable chase cards and reprinted limited filler. I think either option is viable.
Reprinting only chase cards would not go over well with a lot of players and it defeats the primary purpose of Master's Editions. I agree with Endless on this one.
1: You can't call it a collectible card game, and then poop on the people who choose to collect cards
2: MED3 was a smashing success
3: Are you really so stunned as to believe a paper legacy player wouldn't be able to figure out how to get digital cards? It's not like he's been cracking packs of each set he wants to get cards from to acquire his staples. He buys from online or trades, both of which are available on mtgo.
4: You obviously don't understand even the most basic premise of the MED series. I'll spell it out to you. They wanted to release cards that haven't and won't see online release. The majority of your dream list for med4 has already been released.
Like I said, I don't try to speculate on specific sleeper cards. It's more of a matter of just paying attention to what format is in low demand and what format is in high demand. I don't play constructed really at all on MTGO, so I don't know what the relevant format is.
It's worth noting that trading is much harder on MTGO in general than it is IRL. There are several reasons for this, some of which Pete touched on (such as the fact there is nearly limitless inventory available for trade/sale -- you're never going to be the only guy in the room with a particular card). There also just isn't as big of a trading culture online as there is IRL, at least that I'm aware of. There used to be a lot more casual trading in the early days but now not so much as bots are so reliable.
Also, it's a lot easier to "go infinite" online without trading than it is IRL. Online, if you have the skill you can win tournaments, earn packs, and sell those packs for good value. Constructed cards are generally cheaper online than IRL, and packs are more expensive. So it's easy to convert your unopened prize into whatever cards you need without trading card for card. IRL, however, it's much harder to get good value for packs because so many people have access to them at wholesale prices. Simply cracking the packs is bad odds too if you are looking for specific cards. So if you want to get the cards you need without actually paying cash for them, your best bet is to trade card for card.
With that sealed pool, I think I would consider mainly artifacts, and just splash red and white for the 4 removal spells. This might even make Golem Foundry useful!
Alternatively, you can go blue plus artifacts and splash the removal package from red, white, or green as needed for each match. I have never seen so much playable blue in sealed.
I would build GUr deck Getting some of the best removal this set have to offer.
In your P2P2, you pick up a mana leak over a magma phoenix (amongst other stuff), this is probably fine if you have a few good blue cards from your first pack, but I don't think you really had much. As it happens the rest of P2 sent you loads of exciting red, so that could have worked out pretty well for you. Obviously I'm saying this in full knowledge of what you were going to receive in the future, but I do think you maybe got "blue goes with white!" stuck in your head a little bit too early. I think I'd've taken the risk on the phoenix, buit I can totally understand why you didn't.
As for the scars pool; er, I don't really know!
I'm not very interested in your red, which seems to be shatter+blast+nothing much.
Your white has two removal spells, and a couple of fliers, but you don't have anything obvious to return with glint hawk, so it doesn't overexcite me.
Black is half infect and half not, with little removal, so I'd probably ignore it.
Green has a couple of tricks, two cantripping removal spells (+sylvok replica), and 2-3 reasonable guys
Your blue looks very solid.
I'd definitely be running blue, probably along with green, and I might consider splashing for the two white removal spells (definitely would if you had a horizon spellbomb). Then I'd run pretty much all of your artifact creatures, flight spellbombs and the +0/+3 vigilance equipment.
I'm interested to see how you built this pool, as I'm not at all sure that my suggestion is correct!
I'm from Poland and there is 2$ per hour minimal wage. So you doing 3 tix over hour is better than flipping burgers in my country. Pretty sad don't you think ? :P
Hi guys and thanks for the comments. Just a warning: Do not try the Mindslaver deck in the Casual Room. I think I got myself blocked by a dozen of players last night :(.
But in case you wonder, that deck is really a blast to play. It locks the opponent very frequently with Mindslaver, and if not, a 6/6 deathtouch-lifelink wurm every turn is not something many decks can handle.
LE
First of all, hi Paul! It's been a while.
Well, MTGO Library does feature a lot of "false positives", that's true, but you just learn to ignore them, the names of those BOTs are always very unusual to begin with, since they are no more active (also, a friend of mine has a BOT with them, and he told me they take out the BOTs who don't get online anymore after a short while, so they can't be months or years old, at least theoretically. The price chart of each single BOT is updated as soon as it goes online). You just have to focus on the couple of dozen BOTs you know well and see often, but I have no problem with that. After every draft, I just check my eventual big cards there, then make a try at MTGOTradersBuyBot, and within 5 minutes I'm happily done. Surely I don't need many hours like the article said. I'm saying so just to point out how it works, I don't think that could change the basic assumptions of the article in any way.
Give in to the blue side.
Trinket Mage is pretty much a must for this deck I think.
Although blue isn't needed for the Liquimetal Coating deck, if you're intending to go with the 'destroy any permanent' theme. My version's G/W and it seems to work well enough. Most people go red though.
Hey, one of our writers wrote an interesting response article to this one.
http://www.quietspeculation.com/2010/10/the-revenue-review-an-open-lette...
No matter what else, Peter has inspired a very heated and interesting topic!
precurser golem + twisted image. yes its ancesrtal recall. saw a guy do it to me yesterday. was actually savage. he played 2 ancestrals and attacked with 1/4 switching it to 4/1 on me in the match.
Honestly, I'm a net decker myself and can admit it. Deckbuilding has never been a strong point of mine and I think it really does take a lot of skill to develop a deck that can dominate a format. Although I do netdeck, I will take the time to learn/play a deck to see if I like it and then test out other cards I think may be a good fit. Looking at the metagame as a whole gives you an opportunity to modify as you see fit.
I haven't been playing much standard the last few weeks but I'm starting to miss it and will probably start playing in some events again.
Wow...that has got to be THE best resource for someone in my situation.
I only play MTGO, no cards, and I have very little time for reading up on MTG.
I do create my own decks often, though they are mostly Tier 2, and end up in the casual room.
I do, however, enjoy competitive standard, and play in tournaments when I can.
I net deck like mad. I have no problem admiting that. Being able to check in on what is out there, and what is winning is invaluable to me. What I usually end up doing, is to pick my archetype, check out all the decks I can of that type, and then create a slightly modified version built to my taste. I am sure that is not at all unusual, but maybe admiting is.
Thanks!!!
I use this page, which posts new deck results everyday.
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Digital/MagicOnline.aspx?x=mtg/digital/magi...
There is also a "Decks of the Week" page which I believe is updated once a week as well. Thanks for reading.
Wanted to say that I really enjoyed the decks you highlighted in the last two articles as many of the lists seem pretty close to optimum and there is a great variety as well.
There will be some interest in block, especially for those players that are looking for something different to play besides legacy/extended events which don't seem to fire all that much. The entry point of block is usually always lower than standard. Last season I couldn't justify investing a few hundred dollars into a standard deck when i started playing but i could justify the price of a block deck like Boros which was cheap to build and could be competitive. There will be premier events for block on the weekends (similar to standard) and daily events everyday, although the block events don't draw as many people as the standard events do. Overall, I think block is a good starting point for a player looking to get into the occasional tournament without spending a fortune.