[QuikSand]

The Art of Sniping

So, despite my discussions here about complex schemes for this and patience yielding that, the most productive thing to beat the market is just understanding sniping.

In this case, "sniping" is defined as perching as cards enter the marketplace, and when they arrive at an attractive price, you buy them immediately for the asking price. Simple as that. Sort of.

So, MUT Sniping 101 is basically watching a market you understand fairly well, and waiting for a card to pop up at a price where you believe you can sell it at a profit. No really serious skills needed here, just patience and luck.

Fine, got it. These cards typically go for 20,000 coins, and if I posted one right now at that price I could sell it for 20,000, meaning that after 10% tax I pull down 18,000. If that card is available for, say, 16,000 or less that's a sniping opportunity and should turn a short term profit, enough to compensate for the risk I'm taking.

Okay, what's next?

MUT Sniping 201 requires an understanding of the mechanics of the auction house, and understanding this is the single most important thing separating those who "get it" and those who don't.

Here's the big reveal: The auction house is only designed to show us 100 cards at a time. And if your set of filters you use to refine the search yields more than 100 cards, the first thing the auction house software (on both the console and in the app) will do is truncate your results to the 100 cards closest to their auction expiring.

This is not obvious, nor intuitive. But if you don't get it, you can't beat the market at a level higher than a little luck and a patience.

Filter by "Players rated 88 or 89" and "all offense" and then sort by "lowest buy now price" and intuitively you think you are seeing ALL such players, with the cheapest such guys at the top of the list. Tons of people do exactly this, and buy with confidence.

But right now, there are over 300 such players for sale. The game isn't showing you all of them, just the ones closest to expiring. Most players are put up for auction for one hour, so what you're seeing are just the guys who are within 18 minutes of their auction ending.

Why is this a problem? Remember above... the sniper is picking off bargains right as they become available. So, after 40 minutes of sitting around with no bids, what you're seeing with this bad filter is a list of offerings that the sharps have already declined. They are inherently bad deals. You are only looking at bad deals.

So... MUT Sniping 201 is... do enough filtering that you are always looking at 100 or fewer cards, in total. The whole universe of your filtered search. That way, you see them all. It can be painstaking... you might have to amend that earlier search of 88/89 offense to now include only 88/89 tight ends, or 88/89 offense from the Superstars set... but you need to see ALL the results, not just the closest-to-expiring. That's basically it, that's the 201 level key you need.

The way to tell? Sort your search by "Newest" and if the offerings are lively at all, they will start at "59 minutes remaining" meaning just put onto the block for 1hr. Now your filters are good, and you can sort by whatever you want, knowing you're getting a legit search. Snipe this way.

Now, what's next for MUT Sniping 301?

Pick your spots. What we want is a lively segment of the auction house (where a lot of cards are showing up) and ideally where there's a meaningful delta between the buy and sell prices prevailing. How can that persist? Remember the gets-it and doesn't-get-it groups. They will give us our edge.

When the Team of the Week lands each Tuesday, there are a wave of Madden players ripping packs and getting TOTW cards. And many of them are trying to complete sets to get the top-end cards from that week's set. In-game, that means there's a screen that lets you just click to do a pre-set search fo r the appropriate players -- very handy.

Except, when that market is hot, the search will return more than 100 players, and they only see the ones still around after some time. The bad deals. To complete a TOTW set, you might need 4x copies of any of the 4 85-rated cards from this week, you're on that page, and you do that search, it pulls up a big page of cards with the cheapest at, say, 28,000 gold. You buy 4 of them, and you're on your way to building the big stud of the week. Cool.

I, on the other hand, am also searching the 85-rated guys, but I'm doing so card by card... my searches are turning up only 80 cards each, not 300+. I'm seeing the ones that get listed for 15,000 and 18,000 and 20,000. You don't - they are gone before they get to your time-bound search. But what you are seeing is the same card that I just sniped for 18,000 right as it was placed for sale... and then I immediately turned around and re-listed it for 28,000. In 40 minutes, it shows up in your crappy filter looking like a good deal. You're happy, I'm rich.

It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen regularly... a market is artificially and temporarily hot and the ongoing list of sell prices is cacophonous but decidedly two-tiered... the exact same card over the last 5 minutes will have sale prices (from the model above) of 19, 20, 29, 19, 29, 29, 18, 29, 29, 20, 21, 29, 29... etc. The rich get richer, the poor get the picture.

That's the best setup you can get, generally limited only by the game's hard limit on only having 20 cards for sale at any time. So, with 1-2m in gold lying around, I'd rather be playing this game with the 90-rated cards for 100K - 124K than with the 85-rated cards for 20-something. But that's the play.


Anyway... that's the main reveal on how to make money in the Madden Auction House without quitting your day job. Learn a few tricks, and constantly look for ways to exploit them.