Anywho, I don't completely agree with all that I've read so far from a dubstep genre perspective, but I'll swing through later to see if everything is fixed to finish reading.

Oh, and if you are trying to sell bulk, normally humans are going to pay less than bots. Selling by specific card, however, you can normally net some gains by throwing up a classified add of your own or even replying to someone else'. There's no way I would sell "X" card for a ticket less to a bot, when I could potentially sell to a human for a decent amount with little to no work/wait. It's worth more to me to hold off selling if all I can find is a bot that buys for 1/4 of a sell price.

Electricity costs you different amounts per kilowatt/hour depending on where you live. There isn't a basic rate that is charged everywhere in the world. Also, every appliance, built to different standards, consumes electricity differently. If you have a water heater, A/C unit, or something else fairly large, you can probably find a yellow sticker on it somewhere telling you how much electricity it uses to function over the course of a year. Find an electric bill or call your utility company and you can find out just how much you are paying per kilowatt/hr of electricity. From there you should be able to consult a calculator 🙂

Don't even bother though unless for curiousity's sake. It doesn't cost enough to matter, trust me. You'd have to have the worst bots on MTGO, or your electricity would have to cost you so much that you would have never stayed on your computer long enough to ask these questions.

Power costs in my area put running a midrange PC w/out monitor at $10 a month. (I was paying $40 a month several years ago to play WoW 30+ hrs a week on gaming pc with a 21 inch CRT).

If you buy the price list every 12 hours it costs you $12 a month (at 0.2/download). If you are paying $60 a month to the bot for rental you really need to be moving some cards to recover that. The problem with selling cheeper cards like your Temple Bell example is that you need enough of them for someone to get thier whole tickets worth. I went to a bot last night that had 12 rares for 1 which is 0.083 ea, but either they were so picked over that you couldn't find 12 you wanted. The reason certainly was that he couldn't buy sustainable rares for that price since there are many bots that will buy them 12-15 for 1.

Most likely with prices that low he's just unloading his draft trash and trying to get a little bit more for it than he could get selling to an established chain, but it doesn't seem like he's putting enough into it to make sales.

@theDude: while this may be true on higher priced items (baneslayer, Jace TMS, etc.) on the lower priced items, there usually is a march large profit margin. for example, bots will usually buy temple bell for .08-.15 and sell for .5+ which is at least 330% of their buy price

Yeah, I am wondering too. Everytime I look for players to sell my cards I see that they pay worse than the bots, then i turn around and sell to a bot.

Of course, if you have your own bot…

Keep in mind that's going to be your upper limit. A computer (almost) never uses 100% of it's power supply's potential output. When idle, big power hogs like graphics cards go idle, while harddrives get to spin down and CPU's speed-step (not sure if they still call it that?).

I would guess with MTGO minimized (to alleviate the GPU load), monitor turned off, and nothing else running, you're probably looking around 50-100 watts. If you're using a laptop, even less (they're designed for low power consumption), if you're using a Mac Mini, they advertise around 15 watts.

Add the power supply wattage to your monitor wattage and multiply by your cost per kilowatt*hr from your electric company. This is your cost per hour.

For example, a 450W power supply + 50W monitor = 500W. If your electricity is $0.08/kWh, you're spending $0.96 a day to run your computer continuously.

Boot Camp, however, does require you to partition your hard drive.

Parallels can turn a Boot Camp partition into a Parallels virtual disk, but you can't go (easily) in the opposite direction.

Max out your RAM if you're going to use Parallels — I have 4GB and sometimes it can act up, depending on what else I have going on at the same time.