Being a financial genius has its drawbacks.
For example, I’m constantly hounded with this question: “Medina, what’s this card worth?” I also have to study pricing trends; a simple question like, “Is this card going to go up or down?” demands a lot of research and understanding of the market. I have to admit, though, the most annoying drawback is the mob of chicks that follow me everywhere that I go; it’s hard to keep them away. Thea Steele and Lauren Lee are constantly fighting over me (relax ladies, there’s plenty Medina to go around). [
Bold move, Medina. Bold. Move. —LL
]
Between trading, answering financial questions, researching trends, and fighting off the ladies, I’ve had very little time to actually play Magic.
This is a problem, for the following reasons:
Reason number one — Magic is awesome, and it sucks when you don’t get to play it.
Reason number two — If I’m going to keep my information relevant, I have to actually play the game and understand the formats that I’m dealing with.
Reason number three — The whole idea behind trading was so that I could afford to play Magic; now I can play whatever deck I want, except I don’t have time!
I approached this problem like I do every problem in my life — I attempted to destroy it. (Moral of the story: don’t become my problem.)
The most reasonable way for me to increase my game time was to use Magic Online (MTGO). I’ve used Magic Online before, but mainly to buy cards from Top 8 decklists and then resell them for profit. My only experience playing MTGO was a few years back; I played the Elf Combo deck when it was in Standard. I remember this being a freakin’ nightmare because I had a million Nettle Sentinel triggers every game. I think that I quit when I found out that you can lose by timing out.
Lame!
Anyways, I was excited about playing a deck without Nettle Sentinels and building an online collection.
Before I start anything in life, I make a goal. My pops used to always say, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there.” He probably still says it; I’m just not around to hear it. My goals are always inherently lofty; it’s just the kind of person that I am. I like to harness my energy and focus my momentum; this is part of what defines my thinking and makes me successful. Setting a short-term goal without a long-term goal will lead to wasted energy and unguided moments.
In this case, my short-term goal was to build Gerry Thompson
Bantvine deck
and my Oona, Queen of the Fae EDH deck. My long-term goal is to own a playset of every tournament staple on MTGO. This long-term goal allows me to keep the inertia going after my short-term goal is complete. It also allows me to make decisions with the highest longevity rather than making decisions that only serve my immediate goal.
This is where you can laugh at me. In my attempt to play Magic more, I ended up developing a trade strategy and trading more. I’ve only played two games on MTGO in the last month, but I’ve probably traded for over sixty hours.
The first step was to examine what I had and make a “trade binder.” As I flipped thought the digital pages of my binder, I stumbled upon my crown of shame. Hmm… 36 Protean Hulks. I could just hear that “Don’t do drugs” guy saying, “This is your brain. This is your brain on speculation, any questions?”
I also had eight Rangers of Eos, which was pretty cool.
After seeing what I had, I made some stuff untradeable and hit the marketplace with my janky trade binder. I loaded up on tickets while I waited for someone to respond to my classified ad.
“BAMF, Seeks Non-Rotating Cards for his Collection. Must be cheap and easy and enjoy long walks on the beach. Need not be Foil.”
Welcome to Sucksville
Alright, so here’s a revelation that’s probably not a secret to most people. Trading on MTGO is about as fun as chewing on shotgun shells.
The interface is a topic unto itself, but in the interest of space and time, I’ll only voice my biggest complaint. You can only trade up to 75 cards per trade… WTF?!
Beyond that, the people on MTGO are really tough to trade with. I don’t get it. When these people deal with humans, they’ll fight for every quarter, but when they sell to a bot, they’re okay losing so much more on the trade. Do people actually deserve less than robots? I think it’s the whole “license to be a doucebag” mentality that people get when they’re safely parked behind the safety of their computer screen.
Before we jump into the trading tips, it’s important that you understand the economy of MTGO. This economy is different than the one that exists for paper Magic. There are two pillars of the MTGO Economy: Drafting and Bots. These are the main influences on MTGO pricing. The first and most influential is drafting.
You can draft anytime that you want on MTGO, and people do! Tons of packs are opened. This means that singles are more available to meet the demand. This makes them cheaper; the new rares are really cheap, and commons and uncommons from new sets are almost worthless. For example, M11 dual lands can be bought for below a ticket. The mythic rares are the only things that hold a decent value. Drafting also creates a need for packs and tickets.
Anyone who has drafted on MTGO knows how addicting it is. This creates an element of desperation, and drafters often cannibalize their collection to get into another draft. This is where the bots come in.
Bots are software-based merchants that buy cards with tickets and sell booster packs. It’s the bots that make it hard to actually gain any value on MTGO, since they operate on tiny margins, and they’re always available. The bots advertise their buy and sell prices in the classifieds; not only can players check pricing, but they can also execute sales or purchases instantly. This mechanism changes the dynamic of trading on MTGO.
In real life, you can gain value by assuming there’s value in the work of selling or trading a card. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this line in real life, “I can sell it online for $30!”
The truth is: this is a bluff. I usually translate this as, “Can you give me a little more, please?” Everyone knows that this guy isn’t going to sell it on eBay — by the time he gets done paying fees and shipping, he loses the value that he was originally fighting for in the trade anyway.
In MTGO, this isn’t the case. The bots bring “eBay” to the seller or buyer and makes it easy to make transactions. This gives every user an outlet for excess cards, which takes power away from the trader. Learning to navigate this landscape is tough.
After my first hour of trading, I realized that trading on MTGO was miserable, but despite the hostile environment, I was determined to “break the format” of MTGO Trading. I also knew that getting a feel for the process and mindset would prepare me to configure my bot better. I have to warn you that MTGO trading is a grind, but if you have the time and a masochistic slant, here’s some advice to help you grind some value.
Casual
I was confused about this term when I first entered the world of MTGO trading. It seemed like everyone who put this in their classified ad was only interested in trading for commons or uncommons and junk rares, but when I put it in my classified ad, it was like dripping blood into shark-infested waters. From my experience, I’d say that casual trading is a waste of time, if you’re trying to gain value. If you’re looking to build a Pauper deck, then by all means casual it up! I did find the rare casual trade that was decent, but the time investment was too much for the payoff.
Tickets are King
Remember how I was talking about drafters being like crack attics? Well sometimes, drafters are stubborn, and they want .50 tickets more for their cards than bots will give. They will post their offer in the classifieds. Many times, it’s hard to trade for the cards that they have because they need tickets; sometimes you can offer to buy multiple cards and get a discount as long as you offer more than a bot will pay on the entire lot. Be sure that you’re stocked up on tickets while trading. Adding them to a trade to even things out or buying someone’s bulk is a good way to gain incremental value. Speaking of incremental value, this is part of the problem with the MTGO trading system.
Fractions of a Penny
Tickets only come one way, and that’s in units of one, so what happens when you have a card that’s worth 1.50 tickets? This is where you can gain a little value. If you have a card that a bot is selling for 1.50, then you can offer to sell it for one ticket and a throw-in.
This is how I got my M11 dual lands. Many of the M11 dual lands are worth over .50 tickets, like Dragonskull Summit, for example. If you sell your card for one ticket and a Dragonskull Summit, then you essentially make 1.70. You can then take that Summit and combine it with some uncommons to make a ticket out of it.
Rounding up on outgoing trades and rounding down on incoming trades is a great way to grind value. It’s like taking a penny from the tray at the gas station. No, not for the crippled children, that’s the jar — I’m talking about the tray. If you do this a couple million times, it adds up.
Foil Market
The foil market is alive and well in MTGO. Believe it or not, some people prefer their pixels to be shinier than other people. This is the epitome of elitist bullcrap, but where there’s value to be gained, who am I to judge?
The fact is that bots don’t deal in foils as regularly or as openly as they do with regular cards. This creates knowledge gaps, which allow you to gain value by buying and selling foils. I bought a foil Wall of Omens from someone as part of their bulk uncommons (I was doing 75 for one ticket). I didn’t notice it until I was looking through my cards after the trade. I promptly sold it for a ticket and got 74 free uncommons. My buddy
Marin provides a great list of hard-to-find foils that even the bots have mispriced, in
his column here.
Stupid Robots!
Speaking of mispricing in bots, I’ve noticed that cards are commonly mispriced in many different bots, especially the new ones. You can also find deals from the bots that sell “X” uncommons for one ticket. I was going into these bots and buying up all the .50 uncommons, at the time — this was Jace’s Ingenuity, Lilliana’s Caress, and Wall of Omens, among others. These uncommons help to smooth over trades, and sometimes you can sell four .50 uncommons for one ticket. Many bots are slow to update their pricing, so when a new deck breaks you can buy bots out of a certain card before the price rises. This is what I was doing before I started this MTGO adventure.
Paper for Pixel
The most successful technique that I’ve found is trading paper cards for MTGO cards. There’s a strange exchange that goes on here which is pretty awesome. Before I discovered this, I was selling my cards on
MOTL.
This is a good business, and I make pretty good money doing it, but there are slow periods where I don’t sell any cards. This puts a clamp on my Magic cash flow, which disables me from seizing opportunities or impulse-buying hot Japanese foils.
What this new method allows me to do is sell my cards more quickly than I can on MOTL and sometimes at a better premium.
The key is finding the right person; I used Twitter and MOTL to do this. It’s important than you find drafters or people who are okay with trading at bot buy prices. This is the type of mentality that you’re looking for: “I’m just going to sell all this to a bot anyways; why not trade it for a paper card that I need?”
Remember that your paper cards convert to dollars, and their digital cards to tickets. Make sure that you apply the conversion rate to the final ticket total, since you’ll need to convert the tickets to cash after you sell the MTGO cards. This is what the math should look like; tickets translate to 90 to 92 cents on the dollar.
His (MTGO)
2 Vengevine 30 (60)
1 Grave Titan 9
4 Fauna Shaman 1.65 (6.6)
This pile is worth 75.60 tickets. Which translates to $68.04. I used the .90 conversion rate to maintain my margins. Now, after I sell the cards to a bot, I can sell the tickets at .90 and not lose value. If I find someone to buy the tickets at .92, then I make a little extra. The next step is to apply that $68.04 toward paper cards. You can subtract $2 for shipping, which leaves them with $66.04 to work with. This is where you send your list of “haves” and make it clear what price guide you’re using. I use StarCityGames.com generally.
My (Paper)
Taiga REV 40
2 Aether Vial 10 (20)
Grand Architect 4.50
This is a good way to “sell” cards or leverage your paper collection to get eight to ten percent off bot pricing on MTGO cards. The problem with this method is that you need to have a reputation at a trade website to legitimize yourself. If you want to use this method, I recommend that you
build a reputation at one of the trade websites, and make sure your references are impeccable. I use
my reference
page all the time to facilitate trades. It takes work, but once you have a solid reference page, it makes you more flexible, and it brings more opportunity.
After a few weeks of grinding the virtual trade tables, I grew weary and started the quest to build an MTGO robot to do my dirty work for me. Join me next week, and I’ll show you how to build an MTGO robot (kinda).
I’ve been missing you guys in the comment section. Be sure to ask your questions, and leave your comments this week.
Thanks for reading!
Jonathan Medina