A few days ago after I started playing online again I was buying up some commons for my collection and noticed a lot of the bots were from MTGO Library so I went to check it out and it seems to be pretty good. Pretty straight forward, no running in ellipticals trying to figure out how to use them, you can either pay a small monthly fee to use the bots or they can charge a small percentage of your transactions. 2.5% to 3.5%, which you can buy credit in advance so that no one ever has to log in and take money direct from your bot. So far I haven’t had any sales, but it’s taken a couple days just to get the kinks worked out and get it running stable. Competition seems a lot more fierce than a couple years ago though since all the new bots are “smart bots”, they can track prices for individual cards much easier than they used to.

There’s only 1 hobby shop in town and all they sell is packs and a few singles, they’ve only got around 3000 cards for sale, mostly commons. I’ve got handy 18000, probably more but I haven’t bothered to really add up the boxes/binders.

I experimented a fair bit with card values and ended up settling on a routine that seems to work for me. I don’t touch rares with the bot although that would probably be a better money maker overall. I generally try to keep over 10,000 cards on the bot, typically around 8,000 commons and 2,000 uncommons. Whenever I get down to around 9,000 cards I flip back into ‘buy’ mode and spend roughly half the tickets I had earned on buying new cards and then transfer the remaining tickets to my main account and spend them on cards I need.

My routine follows as such:

• Buy uncommons at a rate of 48 per ticket for about a week, until I have roughly 1500 to 2000, then switch to commons at a rate of 192 per ticket for another week or until I have around 8 to 9000 of those.
• Open up trades with my main account to transfer remaining tickets and any commons/uncommons that I have less than 4 of
• Switch to seller mode (sell 26 cards per ticket) for roughly 2 weeks or until I’m up around 40 or 50 tickets again and out of ‘good’ cards. Selling 26 per ticket means I just about double my money on the uncommons and make a killing on the commons. I find that of course uncommons are what sell the best but people do tend to fill up on commons if I have some of the harder to find ones or they just can’t find enough uncommons to fill the 26.

So on average my cycle takes about a month during which time I earn about 30 tickets to spend on rares for my own collection. It’s not a lot, and I won’t get rich doing it, but it means I get to play and collect for free which makes it a nice little side hobby. MTGO Brain currently values my collection at$4500 so I figure I’d be able to get around $1000 for it on eBay.

The in-game Message Boards are full of trading bots, personally I think this is a great thing. The adopted trading currency in the game are the Event Tickets which are normally used for entering tournaments. Since they cost $1 each from the MTGO store, it’s an easy number to work with. Sometimes hundreds of Common cards can be had for just one ticket and it’s fairly easy to find 30 or more Uncommons also for 1 ticket. Rares get a little more expensive with certain cards being worth 60 tickets or more. There are hundreds of Rares available at good rates though, 4 for 1 and 3 for 1 deals can be found on a few bots daily.

With over 7700 cards in the game spanning more than 30 sets, it could take years to collect them all. After about a year I have over 15,000 cards in my collection but I’m still missing a lot of them. The reason I have so many is that for Commons and Uncommons I’m attempting to get a playset of each card, which means 4 of each instead of just 1. I haven’t gone for playsets of Rares because that would just take forever at the rate I’m going. Currently I’m at 5726 out of 7702. Oh, and then there’s the Premium foil cards which I haven’t begun collecting yet either, that’s another 6980 cards to gather up. At the rate they keep dropping new sets, I’ll never catch up!

After a couple of years though it kinda died off around here, a lot of the regular players went off to college and I opened my own store and had very little free time for stuff like that.  Last year I started playing again when I could find the time, and when I heard about Magic Online I signed up right away.  It’s technically free to play, you do have to pay $10 to register, but then you get a $10 credit to use at the MTG online store to buy packs of cards with.

The game play is pretty much identical to playing in person and since you have to actually buy your cards in 15 pack boosters, just like the paper version, it makes for a realistic experience.  The big downside of course is that not all the cards are available in the online version.  Mirage and Visions have been released, but aside from that it only goes back as far as 7th Edition & the IPA block.

What I enjoy most about playing online is that I can log in at any time and be playing a game within minutes.  No more waiting til a certain night of the week and wondering if enough people are going to show up.  I haven’t yet taken part in any of the online tournaments, but I did sign up for a few of the 4 week leagues.  Those were pretty fun but I never won more than a pack or two doing that.  I’m just too out of practice I guess.