Recently Alex Majlaton and I were on Magic Online at the same time, and he sent out a message to the clan that he and I are both members of. He was looking for cards for a Dragonstorm deck, for use in a Standard Premiere Event that was starting in a few minutes. As it turned out, I had some of what he needed, so we negotiated a trade where I would give him the cards for a draft set.
The problem was, I had no idea how to give him the cards. I knew to right-click on his name and select “Trade,” but I had no idea how to actually exchange the cards. By the time I had found the relevant section of the Help file, the event had already started (although Alex hadn’t found all the cards he would need anyway).
It was at that point that I decided one day out of my Daily series should be dedicated to the “Trading Post” icon on your MTGO homepage. Trading has not been a big part of my MTGO experience so far, but at some point it probably will have to be, if I ever want to play Constructed. Plus, it’s probably a big part of your experience, since I’m pretty lucky to have the job that I do.
Non-users should understand that trading is a lot more than just right-clicking on someone and selecting “Trade.” For most trade functions, Magic Online manages your trade collection exactly as though it were a real-life binder. You see pages and pages of your cards, organized by set and color. You can then set the number of each card that you want to be available for trade. You can also look at your collection in a spreadsheet form, but you can’t set cards as tradeable in the spreadsheet, and you can’t trade out of the spreadsheet view.
This immediately struck me as just about the most inefficient way to manage one’s collection that you can imagine. Why not maximize the spreadsheet capability of your collection by letting you trade out of the spreadsheet view? Why force a trade to occur the same way as in real life, laboriously flipping through someone’s binder, if there could be a searchable spreadsheet to find what you’re looking for? Worse yet, why do I even have a searchable spreadsheet if I still have to flip through the binder by hand to make certain cards available for trade? I hope this aspect of MTGO undergoes heavy revision with version 3.
As I set cards available for trade, I immediately realized that while I didn’t have many tradeable rares – not if I wanted to ever play Constructed with the Ravnica block dual lands I had opened, anyway – I had a boatload of uncommons and crap rares. I had something like 24 tradeable Brine Elementals alone. I suppose that I could give the proper stakes on a dare to Brian David-Marshall, so that he could hype his “Pickles” deck enough that I could get rid of that many Brine Elementals. It would take away a ton of valuable drafting time, though, and BDM would gloat too much anyway.
Thus, I was surprised to learn that people don’t like the sheer number of bots in the Trading Post. I have to admit that when I first tried to trade on MTGO, I was a little intimidated by all the bots there. There are now so many of them that trading with a human being is near impossible. However, as soon as I figured out how to work with them, it turned out that the bots are by far the easiest way to turn your chaff cards into free tickets.
All you need to do is find the sort of bot you’re looking for – in my case, an “X-for-1 uncommon” bot which would take X of my uncommons for 1 ticket. I don’t quite understand how a 32-for-1 bot can remain in business when there are 18-for-1 bots out there also, but I guess there are enough uncommons out there for everybody.
You then trade with the bot just like you would with a normal person: right-click and select “Trade.” Most bots are programmed such that after you’ve chosen what you want (in my case, 1 ticket) and selected “Confirmed” in the trade window, the bot will choose what it “wants” (in my case, X uncommons). I’ve had one case where the bot seemed to be buggy or badly set up, and it didn’t choose something. Most bots, however, will pick what they like from your tradeables.
Using this method, I was able to make an easy six tickets in less than half an hour (although the amount that I spent to acquire that many junk uncommons and rares, I don’t want to think about). In fact, the worst thing about the accumulation of bulk-trading bots is that they make it hard to find the serious deals that you want to make; if I wanted to sell one of my Ravnica duals, it would take some time to find and comparison shop amongst the relatively few people and bots that make those deals.
During these various deals, I noticed that I was working with the same bot program, YaTBot. If you’d like to set up your own bot, you can find YaTBoT here, and you can read this article to find out about establishing a bot to use yourself.
Lest this become the Bot Article, I should point out that the largest deal I did on MTGO was with a person, selling two Hypnotic Specters that I had opened in 999 drafts for 13 tickets. Although I used to hear horror stories about people who tried to obtain unfair trades via big cheats (such as adding cards to the trade at the last second), I think that if you carefully peruse the Confirm window that appears right before you would finalize the trade, there should be no problems.
I’ve also heard people talking about something called the 1:1 Project, which I’m guessing is a federation of folks who want to trade one-for-one (check out the big brain on Brett!), but I haven’t really had the time or inclination to look into it. There’s so much drafting to do…
Back tomorrow to respond to your forum comments.
mmyoungster at aim dot com
mm_young dot livejournal dot com