I am looking at diving back into mtgo at a pace of 2 drafts per week. The intention is to have some fun drafting and eventually redeem a paper set for M15 and one each from Khans block. Before I go ahead with the plan I am trying to forecast the cost. Below is the baseline I have put together. I would appreciate feedback on how accurate this is.
Assume I want to draft 24 times over the life of M15.
Assume my record is always 1-2 followed by 2-1, all in swiss.
This means I win 36 packs but must seed 36 packs myself.
Assuming an average price of 3 tix per pack over the life of the format it will cost me 108 tix for packs.
Entry fees are 48 tix.
In total, drafting has cost me 156 tix.
Assume 24 tix for missing pieces, bringing the total to 180 tix.
Does this seem like an accurate baseline? I have not drafted much since RTR but prior to that I drafted Shards block, ZEN block, Scars block, M13 and RTR pretty heavily.
Actually, I can tell you my experience. I've come back on MTGO around Dark Ascension after a two-year hiatus. I'd say my win rate is higher than you outline, but I'm very far from being infinite. For every set except DA (where I was impossibly lucky opening multiple huntmaster of the fells) and VMA (I got 2 P9 cards in 3 drafts), I drafted way more than 24 drafts per set. More like 60+. I never accumulated a full set of cards. I was always missing 5-8 mythics, and most of them the priciest ones. So at the end, to redeem, I had to spend around 30$ to 40$ more just for the card.
Not being in the USA, the 25$ redemption cost, plus 25$ shipping cost, plus ~20$ custom cost (thanks to wizards declaring a value above 25$, currently set at 75$) means that after all the drafting it cost me about another 110$ (40+25+25+20). You can figure out that it is not worth it anymore to draft with the aim to redeem.
I hold that Wizards has completely failed to live up to the promises of redemption and the argument behind charging the full price for boosters online.
I've not spend money online for about 2 months now (ever since the VMA pre-release) and spent the money on paper single instead. Doing this result in me having more paper cards for my money, as long as I'm willing to give up on expensive staples, the money cards of each set. (so, no Nissa, no Garruk, no dual, etc for M15, but play sets of dollar-bin rares, which are enough to build casual decks. I sometimes buy one-of of a few expensive cards.)
Thanks for the detailed reply, pierrebai. As it stands I am hoping to save some costs in shipping by redeeming all four sets in May or June of next year. The good thing about the shipping fee (the only good thing) is that it still applies to one set or one hundred sets.
Has anyone else had experience with redemption? Just trying to set a good baseline for my own budget so I know how much I will have to spend on paper cards. I still play paper once a week with my buddies but the convenience of drafting anytime is a real selling point for mtgo.
I crunched these numbers for M15 myself. I did this for M10 about 150 drafts with a similar win % as you (50%). My win percent in swiss is about 66% now (maybe a bit higher) but these cards are worth so little. It's pretty critical that you open the money rares. (Nissa, Ajani et).
I estimated that a draft costs me 5 tix (using your $3 per pack value). 30ish drafts would cost $150 then plus anything else you had to buy. Right now you can buy the whole set for $75 So basically you are paying 2-2.5x more to draft it.
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Drafting is a money loser for at least 99% of players. If you are drafting because it's fun, great. If you are drafting to acquire cards - stop right now, sell the packs and tickets, and then buy the cards you want.
Drafting was expensive before the $25 redemption fee. With that, however, it is worse, as that $25 fee has reduced the value of the bottlenecks for redemption (mythics) by around $20 per set. The only cards where redemption pushes a high price is foil mythics now, and you open one of those about 1 in 100 drafts.
However, redemption can be profitable.
As a better than average but not exceptional drafter, I accept that every draft I enter is throwing away $5 for some fun. I work on an expectation of winning 2 boosters and opening cards worth 1 ticket (normal sets) or 5 tickets (VMA) on average. Of course most times you open less money than that.
Thanks for the feedback! I think I am going to give it a shot this block and see how it goes. With the total set price for M15 being so low I don't think it will be tough to fill in the blanks for redemption.
I have been down the 'fish the rares and mythics out of drafts' road before. The simple answer is that it doesn't work. I have been doing redemptions since M12 and by now my steps are as follows:
1. One month into the set prices for everything are at their lowest because of heavy early drafting. I buy from bots as much of the set as possible, with the exception of any mythic rare that is way expensive but is useless in modern (Garruk Apex will likely be one of those since anything at 7 mana in Modern needs to say in the rule text "You play this card, you win the game"), or cards like the Scry lands, that, while useful, will never be $5 useful in Modern.
I also buy all the cheap cards at this time to simplify my completion. It is a burden to be aware of 100 cards you are missing. If all of them together cost you $5, even if they will be at $2 by the time the set is about to rotate, it makes for much easier accounting to get them out of the way, and that way you can concentrate on the handful you are missing.
2. As time goes on some of the money mythics or rares go out of favor. I pick those out one by one. Because I also play a lot of constructed, if I like a card and want to play it, I will buy it, even at a higher price, as long as it is under $5. I did this with Ashiok, even if this card will likely go down more as it nears redemption. I love Vraska, and once it went down enough, I bought it and played it tons.
3. Whatever is left is usually 5 to 10 cards (2 in the case of DGM). If I am unlucky, as was the case of Liliana of the Veil, I bite the bullet and buy it for my redemption. Once I am down to one or two cards, like Voice of Resurgence, I will do a draft or two to see if I get lucky. In the case of VOR, I did, and got mine out of a draft.
4. I make sure I am done by October. Some of the money cards will slowly become popular in other formats and will climb out of nowhere. This is what happened with Griselbrand. I got it at $20 as it was cycling out, and Boom! it went crazy a month later. I would not be surprised if Vraska never did go down (yes, its a 5 drop, but anything that says 'destroy target permanent' is good, is very good).
Also, don't fall in love with a card, or hate a card. Make sure you understand why a card is destined to be a staple, and why a card is destined to fail in the eternal formats. Griselbrand could only go up, while Thragtusk could only go down. Snapcaster Mage could only go up, while some of the Theros one-trick ponies will go down hard once rotation nears. I just got Domri Rade for my redemption just in case: a 3 drop planeswalker is a 3 drop planeswalker and Domri has seen tons of play.
I have been down the 'fish the rares and mythics out of drafts' road before. The simple answer is that it doesn't work. I have been doing redemptions since M12 and by now my steps are as follows:
1. One month into the set prices for everything are at their lowest because of heavy early drafting. I buy from bots as much of the set as possible, with the exception of any mythic rare that is way expensive but is useless in modern (Garruk Apex will likely be one of those since anything at 7 mana in Modern needs to say in the rule text "You play this card, you win the game"), or cards like the Scry lands, that, while useful, will never be $5 useful in Modern.
I also buy all the cheap cards at this time to simplify my completion. It is a burden to be aware of 100 cards you are missing. If all of them together cost you $5, even if they will be at $2 by the time the set is about to rotate, it makes for much easier accounting to get them out of the way, and that way you can concentrate on the handful you are missing.
2. As time goes on some of the money mythics or rares go out of favor. I pick those out one by one. Because I also play a lot of constructed, if I like a card and want to play it, I will buy it, even at a higher price, as long as it is under $5. I did this with Ashiok, even if this card will likely go down more as it nears redemption. I love Vraska, and once it went down enough, I bought it and played it tons.
3. Whatever is left is usually 5 to 10 cards (2 in the case of DGM). If I am unlucky, as was the case of Liliana of the Veil, I bite the bullet and buy it for my redemption. Once I am down to one or two cards, like Voice of Resurgence, I will do a draft or two to see if I get lucky. In the case of VOR, I did, and got mine out of a draft.
4. I make sure I am done by October. Some of the money cards will slowly become popular in other formats and will climb out of nowhere. This is what happened with Griselbrand. I got it at $20 as it was cycling out, and Boom! it went crazy a month later. I would not be surprised if Vraska never did go down (yes, its a 5 drop, but anything that says 'destroy target permanent' is good, is very good).
Also, don't fall in love with a card, or hate a card. Make sure you understand why a card is destined to be a staple, and why a card is destined to fail in the eternal formats. Griselbrand could only go up, while Thragtusk could only go down. Snapcaster Mage could only go up, while some of the Theros one-trick ponies will go down hard once rotation nears. I just got Domri Rade for my redemption just in case: a 3 drop planeswalker is a 3 drop planeswalker and Domri has seen tons of play.
I would advise to just buy the entire set about 7 days before it is redeemable (if it is only going to be heavily drafted until the next set release, such as M15 or JOU), or 14 days after the next set release (if the set is still going to be heavily drafted then, so for Theros this meant 14 days after Born's release).
If you draft for fun, sell your drafted cards immediately. It will help you understand better exactly how much you are losing from drafting (most people do not understand this at all). This lesson is worth much more than the (tiny) number of extra tickets you could get by holding these cards until the best time possible to sell. Speculation on specific singles can work if you understand the game well but most people do not, and even if you do the risk is high.
It is also quite reasonable to buy 4 sets of the first set of a block when it is nearly as low as it will ever get and sell it as a big lot the next year (8 months prior to rotation or so) when you think it is as high as it will get. Whole sets are pretty safe - sometimes metagame shifts or future printings will push a big $ card down from its high value pedestal (example: the printing of Lifebane Zombie hammering the value of Voice of Resurgence, a card that might otherwise have hit 60-70 tickets but Lifebane pushed that whole deck out of the metagame) but these shifts seldom affect entire sets. There's no guarantee, however - Dragon's Maze was indeed hit so hard by the VoR drop that the set went lower than I would have anticipated.
M15 total cost for 4 copies of each card was $319.
I very rarely lose all 3 games in drafts and 75% of the time i am 2-1 and i tossed my original tracking sheet but i believe i won 5 drafts. I spend a solid week doing nothing but mock drafts to make sure i know the set inside and out before it comes out.
I keep track of cards when i draft and make sure i try to pick cards i do not have, especially if they are money cards(even if they do not play well in limited).
I shop bots for cheap rares and buy the majority of commons & uncommons to fill out the set. Know which bots to shop, if your willing to spend the time you can find stuff fairly cheaply.
I redeem only when cards rotate out of standard. So the next rotation i will redeem a total of 20 sets RtR x4 Gatecrash x4 DM x4 and M14 x4. One shipping cost.
If i do the math for M15 my total redemption cost for 4 sets would be
$319 + $100 +$2.99 = $421.99
Total set value currently X4 according to MTG Goldfish is $260.55 x4 = $1042.2. Price of a set generally drops anywhere from 10 to 30% once it rotates out of standard. The median of 20% i still almost double my money.
The worst current example is Dark Ascension current set value of around $87.
The best being Innistrad current set value of $230.
In the end i feel like i come out ahead. I sell the cards i don't want for paper standard cards for the decks i want to play.
The key is being able to win at limited enough to keep playing over and over with a limited investment. Some sets i have better luck at than others with regards to cracking money cards. If i crack a money foil, like i did in this last draft x2 i sell it to buy cards.
This round after RtR will be the first time for paying $25 per set. So i will continue to track each set for value.
In the end i enjoy collecting and playing. Sometimes i do better and sometimes worse. This was an above average draft for me. I cracked alot of good cards while drafting.
4 of each card in M15 from an MTGO dealer costs about USD 322 as of this morning (at least that is Goatbots price if you pay in currency, not tickets), so if you can actually get them for 339 with a lot of drafts thrown in, that's very cheap entertainment.
I'd say that only the top 5% of Limited players can achieve that.
Left something out. Within about 3 or 4 days of pre release M15 packs were selling for $2.60 each. I bought as many as i could find for future drafts. Drafts would only cost me $9.80 per draft. If i won 2 games i would get 2 packs + all the cards. So my next draft would cost me $4.60 and so on..... As we all know M15 packs were as high as $3.15 per pack and now hover around $3.05 each to sell. So make sure your constantly hit those bots and look for good deals.
Left something out. Within about 3 or 4 days of pre release M15 packs were selling for $2.60 each. I bought as many as i could find for future drafts. Drafts would only cost me $9.80 per draft. If i won 2 games i would get 2 packs + all the cards. So my next draft would cost me $4.60 and so on..... As we all know M15 packs were as high as $3.15 per pack and now hover around $3.05 each to sell. So make sure your constantly hit those bots and look for good deals.
In that case I think you should reassess your accounting.
You didn't spend USD 339 on drafting, you spent USD 390 or so on drafting, offset by profits of about USD 51 on booster speculation.
A lot of people think they are infinite from constructed play on MTGO when they are not, but they make enough in trading to offset their losses.
Sirgog. I spend a solid week for about 7 to 8 hours a day doing nothing but mock drafts and saving decks on MTG mirror. By the time the actual release hits i know exactly what cards i want to select, i can already build decks in my head because i know what every card does and for the most part how they interact. If you go into a draft having to actually read cards, chances are your not going to win many games.
LSV on channel fireball also does a fairly decent limited breakdown for every card in every color(man has way to much time on his hands). He isn't always right but the way he rates the cards gets you pretty close and also gives some decent explanations as to why some cards are good and others are bad.
Never said i was infinite, only that i feel in the end i make money on set redemption for paper cards. I think that was the original premise of this post. in the end most paper sets(with some rare exceptions) are worth double the online sets.
If it matters I still think throwing in the occasional sealed daily is worth it for this exercise. The EV is higher than draft unless you are really bad at sealed.
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It's been nearly a year after the original post. I haven't tried MTGO yet but am considering it to a) have a lot of fun drafting and b) ultimately doing a set redemption. I'm very curious, if OP is still out there, what his experience was after trying this for M15.
I had that dream back in Scars. I don't think I have ever hit a complete set from drafting yet. Near the time of New Phyrexia I realized its a pipe dream. Your only chance of getting ahead is if there is a major outlier in price and you happen to be amazing at opening it.
Draft for fun, assume you are going to lose all your matches, and if you want you can have a money draft threshold.
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Assume I want to draft 24 times over the life of M15.
Assume my record is always 1-2 followed by 2-1, all in swiss.
This means I win 36 packs but must seed 36 packs myself.
Assuming an average price of 3 tix per pack over the life of the format it will cost me 108 tix for packs.
Entry fees are 48 tix.
In total, drafting has cost me 156 tix.
Assume 24 tix for missing pieces, bringing the total to 180 tix.
Does this seem like an accurate baseline? I have not drafted much since RTR but prior to that I drafted Shards block, ZEN block, Scars block, M13 and RTR pretty heavily.
Not being in the USA, the 25$ redemption cost, plus 25$ shipping cost, plus ~20$ custom cost (thanks to wizards declaring a value above 25$, currently set at 75$) means that after all the drafting it cost me about another 110$ (40+25+25+20). You can figure out that it is not worth it anymore to draft with the aim to redeem.
I hold that Wizards has completely failed to live up to the promises of redemption and the argument behind charging the full price for boosters online.
I've not spend money online for about 2 months now (ever since the VMA pre-release) and spent the money on paper single instead. Doing this result in me having more paper cards for my money, as long as I'm willing to give up on expensive staples, the money cards of each set. (so, no Nissa, no Garruk, no dual, etc for M15, but play sets of dollar-bin rares, which are enough to build casual decks. I sometimes buy one-of of a few expensive cards.)
(Copied from the other thread.)
Has anyone else had experience with redemption? Just trying to set a good baseline for my own budget so I know how much I will have to spend on paper cards. I still play paper once a week with my buddies but the convenience of drafting anytime is a real selling point for mtgo.
I estimated that a draft costs me 5 tix (using your $3 per pack value). 30ish drafts would cost $150 then plus anything else you had to buy. Right now you can buy the whole set for $75 So basically you are paying 2-2.5x more to draft it.
Drafting was expensive before the $25 redemption fee. With that, however, it is worse, as that $25 fee has reduced the value of the bottlenecks for redemption (mythics) by around $20 per set. The only cards where redemption pushes a high price is foil mythics now, and you open one of those about 1 in 100 drafts.
However, redemption can be profitable.
As a better than average but not exceptional drafter, I accept that every draft I enter is throwing away $5 for some fun. I work on an expectation of winning 2 boosters and opening cards worth 1 ticket (normal sets) or 5 tickets (VMA) on average. Of course most times you open less money than that.
1. One month into the set prices for everything are at their lowest because of heavy early drafting. I buy from bots as much of the set as possible, with the exception of any mythic rare that is way expensive but is useless in modern (Garruk Apex will likely be one of those since anything at 7 mana in Modern needs to say in the rule text "You play this card, you win the game"), or cards like the Scry lands, that, while useful, will never be $5 useful in Modern.
I also buy all the cheap cards at this time to simplify my completion. It is a burden to be aware of 100 cards you are missing. If all of them together cost you $5, even if they will be at $2 by the time the set is about to rotate, it makes for much easier accounting to get them out of the way, and that way you can concentrate on the handful you are missing.
2. As time goes on some of the money mythics or rares go out of favor. I pick those out one by one. Because I also play a lot of constructed, if I like a card and want to play it, I will buy it, even at a higher price, as long as it is under $5. I did this with Ashiok, even if this card will likely go down more as it nears redemption. I love Vraska, and once it went down enough, I bought it and played it tons.
3. Whatever is left is usually 5 to 10 cards (2 in the case of DGM). If I am unlucky, as was the case of Liliana of the Veil, I bite the bullet and buy it for my redemption. Once I am down to one or two cards, like Voice of Resurgence, I will do a draft or two to see if I get lucky. In the case of VOR, I did, and got mine out of a draft.
4. I make sure I am done by October. Some of the money cards will slowly become popular in other formats and will climb out of nowhere. This is what happened with Griselbrand. I got it at $20 as it was cycling out, and Boom! it went crazy a month later. I would not be surprised if Vraska never did go down (yes, its a 5 drop, but anything that says 'destroy target permanent' is good, is very good).
Also, don't fall in love with a card, or hate a card. Make sure you understand why a card is destined to be a staple, and why a card is destined to fail in the eternal formats. Griselbrand could only go up, while Thragtusk could only go down. Snapcaster Mage could only go up, while some of the Theros one-trick ponies will go down hard once rotation nears. I just got Domri Rade for my redemption just in case: a 3 drop planeswalker is a 3 drop planeswalker and Domri has seen tons of play.
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I would advise to just buy the entire set about 7 days before it is redeemable (if it is only going to be heavily drafted until the next set release, such as M15 or JOU), or 14 days after the next set release (if the set is still going to be heavily drafted then, so for Theros this meant 14 days after Born's release).
If you draft for fun, sell your drafted cards immediately. It will help you understand better exactly how much you are losing from drafting (most people do not understand this at all). This lesson is worth much more than the (tiny) number of extra tickets you could get by holding these cards until the best time possible to sell. Speculation on specific singles can work if you understand the game well but most people do not, and even if you do the risk is high.
It is also quite reasonable to buy 4 sets of the first set of a block when it is nearly as low as it will ever get and sell it as a big lot the next year (8 months prior to rotation or so) when you think it is as high as it will get. Whole sets are pretty safe - sometimes metagame shifts or future printings will push a big $ card down from its high value pedestal (example: the printing of Lifebane Zombie hammering the value of Voice of Resurgence, a card that might otherwise have hit 60-70 tickets but Lifebane pushed that whole deck out of the metagame) but these shifts seldom affect entire sets. There's no guarantee, however - Dragon's Maze was indeed hit so hard by the VoR drop that the set went lower than I would have anticipated.
M15 total cost for 4 copies of each card was $319.
I very rarely lose all 3 games in drafts and 75% of the time i am 2-1 and i tossed my original tracking sheet but i believe i won 5 drafts. I spend a solid week doing nothing but mock drafts to make sure i know the set inside and out before it comes out.
I keep track of cards when i draft and make sure i try to pick cards i do not have, especially if they are money cards(even if they do not play well in limited).
I shop bots for cheap rares and buy the majority of commons & uncommons to fill out the set. Know which bots to shop, if your willing to spend the time you can find stuff fairly cheaply.
I redeem only when cards rotate out of standard. So the next rotation i will redeem a total of 20 sets RtR x4 Gatecrash x4 DM x4 and M14 x4. One shipping cost.
If i do the math for M15 my total redemption cost for 4 sets would be
$319 + $100 +$2.99 = $421.99
Total set value currently X4 according to MTG Goldfish is $260.55 x4 = $1042.2. Price of a set generally drops anywhere from 10 to 30% once it rotates out of standard. The median of 20% i still almost double my money.
The worst current example is Dark Ascension current set value of around $87.
The best being Innistrad current set value of $230.
In the end i feel like i come out ahead. I sell the cards i don't want for paper standard cards for the decks i want to play.
The key is being able to win at limited enough to keep playing over and over with a limited investment. Some sets i have better luck at than others with regards to cracking money cards. If i crack a money foil, like i did in this last draft x2 i sell it to buy cards.
This round after RtR will be the first time for paying $25 per set. So i will continue to track each set for value.
In the end i enjoy collecting and playing. Sometimes i do better and sometimes worse. This was an above average draft for me. I cracked alot of good cards while drafting.
I'd say that only the top 5% of Limited players can achieve that.
In that case I think you should reassess your accounting.
You didn't spend USD 339 on drafting, you spent USD 390 or so on drafting, offset by profits of about USD 51 on booster speculation.
A lot of people think they are infinite from constructed play on MTGO when they are not, but they make enough in trading to offset their losses.
LSV on channel fireball also does a fairly decent limited breakdown for every card in every color(man has way to much time on his hands). He isn't always right but the way he rates the cards gets you pretty close and also gives some decent explanations as to why some cards are good and others are bad.
Draft for fun, assume you are going to lose all your matches, and if you want you can have a money draft threshold.