The adventure starts here ... sort of

Well, I've made my first purchase in the online store -- redeeming my starter coupon. Sort of. Most of it, anyway.

I was going to go ahead and buy 10 tickets with the $9.99 online coupon, and pay the entire one cent balance with my credit card. Unfortunately, you can't use a coupon in conjunction with your credit card for a purchase right now -- so I had to buy only nine tickets instead of my planned 10.

On the up side, I called the customer support folks and they were both quick and friendly in explaining the issue to me -- and promised that my remaining 99 cents would be available on the coupon for a later purchase once that functionality in the store is addressed.

So now I have my first nine tickets, and I'm starting to look at how to spend the rest of my $20 for this month. Plus, I'm looking ahead to next week when I can spend my first scheduled $15. This is where I'll need your help.

LOOK at the poll to the right. Pick a choice, or post a reply to this blog note. What should I do with my initial seed monies to get the most out of MTGO? My initial thoughts are to simply get the best pool of cards I can to play in the casual room -- since there's not a lot else to do in MTGO right now. With that having been said, there's several different ways to go about getting the most cards for my money.

1. Buy tickets, trade for cards in bulk.

There are a few bots and a few live traders online now, however I don't see any of the 32-for-1 trade bots or any offers in that range in the marketplace. However, I could go over to the ticker and stalk the room for a bit and see who is willing to sell commons and such at a rate of 32-to-1 or better.

2. Check out the local dealers.

I would think since the in game trading functionality is kind of wonky right now, some of the full-time MTGO sites would have sales on their wares that they would normally sell in game through bots and locally-manned accounts. If anyone knows of any of the dealers making bulk sales of commons or such online -- let me know, and I'll a) Check them out, and b) post a link here for others to peruse.

3. The evil that is eBay.

I'm definitely looking at heading over to eBay and seeing what 4x commons sets they have available. I'm reasonably sure I should be able to get a set of 4x standard commons relatively cheaply -- but I'm not so sure that eBay is the cheapest way to do that. However, right now, eBay may well be the most reliable.

4. Online trading posts.

There's an official online trading board over in the official WotC boards. Both paper and digital cards get swapped there, but I'm leery of the process. Of course, any deal that ends in a cards for tickets trade in game is safe -- but I'm thinking many of the posters want an out of game transaction ... that's not near as safe.

There may be more options than those -- please let me know if I'm missing something obvious. I'm not guaranteeing I'll go by the results of the poll -- but I'd really like to start playing on a budget and not just talking it about it so much!

Oh, one final note -- I got a couple of e-mails to my last request for information regarding getting about in v3. Probably the best source of information listed a post on the official boards from tempesteye -- LINK HERE -- that was posted late in beta. I know I learned a lot about the various chat line commands, and the rest of the information still seems to apply to the current build.

As always, please don't hesitate to let me know how I can make The Thrifty Djinn a more useful and enjoyable resource for all your budget MTGO needs.

Thanks,

Don!