Should I buy in MTGO?

[fsecco]

Is there a place you guys from TMD go to trade on MOL? I'm buying power and maybe I could find cheaper ones with you guys

[ratavagnimalf]

Because of the number of bots available on MTGO, deals are hard to find and not always worth the time you put in to find them. The best you will usually find is the mid point between bot buy prices and bot sell prices. Sometimes if I really want to save a few dollars, I'll post buy prices a little higher than the highest bot buy price and monitor the add at work for a few days. This seems to be the best way to get a deal if you aren't in a rush. Otherwise, price compare and buy the cheapest you find.

[Twiedel]

Personally, I think because of the extremely low margin that bots have, I found it too complicated and time consuming to deal with individuals to save 1 or 2 ticks. Most prices, even for Power are like <Buy for 73> <Sell for 76>. Sure you can get it for 74 or 75 from a human... but really The Lotus is right now the only card where you profit at least more than 2 Ticks by buying from a human. Just watch mtgowikiprice.com and see what cards have a higher margin (some are buy:20 vs sell: 40). There you can get away much cheaper when buying from other players. But it seems most of these cards, which were eternal staples not needed in high numbers due to Vintage not existing, have a climbing buy-price that is soon to be very close to the sell-price.

All in all: Trade with the bots for most stuff, and you won't loose a big deal of money, and you don't need to spend days to gather everything

[fsecco]

Yeah, but my cash is really tight, so I'm studying the market right now. For example, I've seen Lotus fall back to 180 last week (but I didn't have the money) and yesterday it was on 190 on the bots but I found a guy selling for 183. I decided to wait and see if it floats back to 180 or similar. My assumption is that cards tend to lose value during weekdays. That makes sense?

[Smmenen]

wow, look at the prices.  Moxen are all in the 40s now.

[Twiedel]

A friend of mine just bought in (and not the cheapest way) for around 550 Ticks last week. It could even be a bit cheaper now.

I cannot really tell you if weekdays is better or weekends, it always depends on how many people draft and how many new cards come into circulation. In the first weeks, at the weekends so many drafts fired that the bots had no credit, and the price humans asked was rapidly dropping, only to rise again during the week, as the bots bought out the cheap pieces once again. Right now, as you stated, it seems to go the other way - no clear pattern really

Personally, I feel like you won't get a lotus under 180 in the near future. Ever since after the first few weeks, this has been the established price the bot chains buy it for. Moxen and other pieces are falling very slowly, and it is kind of a gamble to wait for the turning point when VMA rotates out.

You need to buy when you think the price is ok for you, that's all... I think nobody can tell you if either most people that wanna play vintage have their power already will drive the prices down even more, or if no new pieces flowing into the market (in a few weeks when the drafts stop) will drive the prices up. Go to Las Vegas and bet on the right colour if you know the answer ^^

[keys]

No Apple OS support is criminal.

[Chubby Rain]

No Apple OS support is criminal.

Unfortunately, they can't make it work on Windows - hate to see how they would screw it up trying to maintain a version for a different operation system at the same time. <Begin rant> I had to ask my stream whether I was an idiot and Jace +2'd my Ancestral Recall away. Turns out Jace is bugged and puts the top card of your deck on the bottom no matter what you pick (his fateseal ability targeting the opponent seems to work). Tangle Wire works now, though. <end rant>

[MTGFan]

What's really criminal is that in 2014 they can't make a simple card game work in a browser so that they don't have to port it to all platforms.

All of the heavy processing (game rules, player info, database processing etc) is done server-side. There's no reason whatsoever they can't make a functional, fast, easy-to-use browser-based version of MTGO that works on macs, pcs, tablets, and phones. Look at other games like Dominion, Cardhunter, and even rogue MTG stuff like Untap.in.

[Coopes]

A friend of mine just bought in (and not the cheapest way) for around 550 Ticks last week. It could even be a bit cheaper now.

I cannot really tell you if weekdays is better or weekends, it always depends on how many people draft and how many new cards come into circulation. In the first weeks, at the weekends so many drafts fired that the bots had no credit, and the price humans asked was rapidly dropping, only to rise again during the week, as the bots bought out the cheap pieces once again. Right now, as you stated, it seems to go the other way - no clear pattern really

Personally, I feel like you won't get a lotus under 180 in the near future. Ever since after the first few weeks, this has been the established price the bot chains buy it for. Moxen and other pieces are falling very slowly, and it is kind of a gamble to wait for the turning point when VMA rotates out.

You need to buy when you think the price is ok for you, that's all... I think nobody can tell you if either most people that wanna play vintage have their power already will drive the prices down even more, or if no new pieces flowing into the market (in a few weeks when the drafts stop) will drive the prices up. Go to Las Vegas and bet on the right colour if you know the answer ^^

I think _most_ people that want power or want to play Vintage are doing so, I also think that Vintage is suffering online and is in need of help from wotc ( biggest problems are poor daily/premier event times and poor payout ).

[fsecco]

Why do you say that, Coopes? (oh ok, I posted before your edit )

I agree that dailies payouts are bad. But that's bound to change once VMA is no longer around. What makes the dailies pay badly is VMA's booster cost. Am I wrong?

[Zherbus]

The time slot of Premier events make them ridiculously hard to fire. We've been able to do it *once*.

And playing in daily events has a strange prize structure, but I think it's mostly okay. 8-mans have better EV.

However, this is starting soon:

http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/vintage-championships-2014-07-14

Qualifiers are daunting at 30 ticket entry.

However, assuming we can dump VMA packs for over 6 tickets:

Go 5-0, 15 packs (and an invite). Prize value is over triple the entry cost.
Go 4-1, 10 packs (and an invite). Prize value is over double the entry cost.
Go 3-2, 5 pity packs, just about break even.

[Coopes]

Why do you say that, Coopes? (oh ok, I posted before your edit )

I agree that dailies payouts are bad. But that's bound to change once VMA is no longer around. What makes the dailies pay badly is VMA's booster cost. Am I wrong?

Adding one VMA booster to 3-1 would change so much, but even that minor of a change I don't see them making. As long as the daily events are less EV than standard and modern ( 12-13 tix for legacy/vintage vs 18-20 for standard/modern ) I don't see anyone playing these formats but the people on here or the die hard fans, no grinders will have any incentive to play a format with such bad returns.

How much can vma boosters really go up? and how long do we have to wait until we get a respectable payout ? what's stopping wotc from bringing back vma earlier than expected? i dont see these boosters going to 10 tickets + each in a reasonable time frame, at least one where I feel fine grinding the dailies now. I'm not a lone here, I know people are still playing and so am I, simply because I enjoy playing the format so much, what I don't enjoy is getting reamed by wotc on prizes.

Changing the times and adding better prize support for eternal formats would potentially be taking away players from their cash cow, standard, they won't let anything hurt standard, which is why I'm not feeling great about this whole situation.

[Zherbus]

Well, we know when VMA will be going off sale. But if you look at the MOCS schedule for 2014-2015, you see them bringing back VMA here and there.

[shrewarmies]

I took the plunge and bought into MTGO. I built up a deck and now I have a 100% win rate... out of one game total.

[Hrishi]

Only thing I am missing are Show and Tells

I'm tempted to buy in right away but with the card being promo'd this month it seems much nicer to wait till the end of the month.

[fsecco]

Until now I was able to buy a full set of P9 (except Twister) and a few cheap things like LoA, Tinker and Will. Now I'm gathering more money to go for FoW, Drains and Duals. Then... fetches. The overall cost is pretty steep...

[KrauserKrauser]

You might as well wait until Khans comes out to see if fetches come out.  If they do expect all ten and a drop.  If not, it will be another year until a reprint most likely.

[enderfall]

You might as well wait until Khans comes out to see if fetches come out.  If they do expect all ten and a drop.  If not, it will be another year until a reprint most likely.

Just be careful with such an approach. The moment they are confirmed to NOT be in Khan's, you have to buy immediately. Otherwise, expect Delta/Strand and maybe even the other Blue fetches to start to climb even higher. That's exactly what happened with Wasteland, and now look at that price.

[JarofFortune]

Aaron Forsythe has said that fetches will not be reprinted this year, because wizards has failed to predict the price spike caused by modern. You'll probably have to wait until the next block if you want cheaper fetches, unless they release more on mtgo as promos or from flashback drafts.

[fsecco]

I'm aiming for duals first because I'm trying to get all VMA cards before it stops selling boosters. I'll probably get a Scalding/Misty playset and 1 Delta/1 Strand and wait, since I rarelly need anything more than that.

Anything else I should dive in right now?