Motivations

I guess I should explain some of my motivation for writing this blog. When I initially set out on my search for articles on going infinite, I found a lot of helpful resources, but most of them were very old, referencing Lorwyn and Shards of Alara. The most recent one talked about Magic 2012. Of course there were forum posts and short articles posted more recently, but the forum posts were not always structured and the short articles were either shameless rehashes of old articles, or meaningless fluff.

On the other hand, I also wanted to keep a record of my own journey, to see how well or poorly I had done. I considered making a spreadsheet to track in and outflows of cash and tix but thought a more public documentation could be fun as well.

So, this blog was born. I hope that it will provide both new players considering getting into MTGO and veterans looking to spend less on the game insight into the process of going infinite, to learn from my success, or my failure. I understand that this blog too will in time become like the others - outdated - but for the time being, it could be useful.

As an aside, for those of you who are new to MTGO, tix (event tickets) are the de facto currency of MTGO. You can buy them at the official store for $1, so each tix effectively represents $1. They can cost a little more depending on the tax situation in your area, and can be converted back to real money at the rate for a 2-6% commission fee, depending on who you find.

Back on track, in my initial research, I found some clear trends and points. These are fairly vague because one, the posts I found had differing advice in some respects, and two, I plan to go into these more in-depth in future posts.

1. Win. As if that weren't obvious enough, winning events more means you get higher returns. Events generally have some sort of entry fee beyond bringing your constructed deck or draft packs. For constructed tournaments, it's 6 tix, or $6, and for drafts/sealed, it's usually 2 tix.

2. Do some events, but not others. There are some event types which pay better than others. Each event has its own expected value (EV) - that is, how much you should expect to get for playing in the event, on average. If you're in MTGO to make money, play the events with high EV.

3. Play the market. Buy low, sell high is a common adage. It's harder than you think. In MTGO, in addition to the main store, there is a secondary market of classifieds. Any player can post an ad for free, and you can use these ads to start trades with other players. There is also a bot system in the market owned by various individuals you can take advantage of for more predictable prices. Finally, MTGO, like the real world, has a stock market, where the commodities and stocks are cards.

Those are the main three points which kept recurring in my research and which I will talk about in future posts.

Cheers.