I hadn't played Magic since Ice Age and I never took it very seriously "back in the day" but when I read here about the v3 Beta, I signed up and played a bunch of drafts. Had some fun, even though I got my ass handed to me a lot. Now that the beta is done though, I'm not sure if I'll be back. I don't really want to get involved in an MMORPG type time and money sink. However, if I could play casually, be competitive and (more or less) have it pay for itself I might stay with it.
So, just how good do you need to be to "go infinite"? There's very little chance I'd ever put the time in to be anything resembling "world class". I'd presumably be playing drafts, sealed and/or leagues.
I don't really understand how the economy works. Boosters are $3.99 from the store. 8 player booster drafts cost 2 tickets each player and prizes are 4-3-2-2. So 11 packs as prizes for $16 in entry fees. So effectively, MTGO is selling those packs for $1.46 each. That seems really exploitable. Couldn't you get 8 of your friends together to play a draft against each other and split the prizes? Or is the secondary market for individual cards so soft that there's no way you make your money back on the opened packs?
Speaking of which, since I was never on the v2 server I never got a real look at the secondary market for singles. I've pulled up price lists for online cards like this one:
http://www.magictraders.com/pricelis...t-magic-online
But I have no idea how reasonable it is for quick sale or selling to bots and there are a lot of cards missing, including rares. However, could you enter a draft and each round only select the most sellable/tradeable card available. Then at the end of the draft try to cobble together the best deck possible and maybe fluke out a win as a bonus, but really the goal being to get the most value from cards and resell/trade them? Since you pay $13.97 to enter (a little less if you get your tickets on the secondary market) and you get 45 cards you'd need an average card value of $.31 to break-even. You're guaranteed three rares from the packs you open, are there enough good uncommons or rares other players might pass over to make up the rest? Or is this a losing game even if you're able to cherry-pick? Surely this is not a new idea...