Magic: The Gathering Online - In-game Economy

In-game Economy

The client software for Magic Online may be downloaded for free from Wizards of the Coast's website, but to play the game, it is necessary to register an account and purchase cards. Registration costs $9.99 and comes with a new account package. This package has 2 event tickets, one starter deck, one Magic 2013 booster, and 300 common and uncommon cards. It is recommended for beginners not to open the booster as it loses value when doing so.

Users may trade cards, sealed packs, event tickets, and in-game avatars (which are released for special events as promotions) with other players. Two venues exist in the current version of the game to facilitate this:

• "Classifieds," which acts as a searchable bulletin board on which players post buy requests for certain cards, or notices of cards they own that are available for trade/sale.
• User-created chat rooms, such as the unofficial Auction room, where traders can sell larger and often bulk numbers of cards quickly to buyers looking for a discount.

There used to exist other suggested methods of trading, but they have been removed in favor of the Classifieds, as the other methods were inefficient and prone to spam. A large number of the users posting offers to buy or sell are entrepreneurs with large collections looking to make a profit by selling cards at their own websites or on eBay in addition to their in-game trades (though in practice the amount of money that can be made heavily trading in the game is not large). Technically any transfer of cards in the game is not considered a "sale" because, for legal reasons, the digital objects are not actually owned by the collector, but rather Wizards of the Coast themselves. This enormously simplifies transactions, as issues such as import/export laws, duties, and underage concerns are sidestepped. Wizards has currently shown "benign neglect" of players buying and selling digital objects for (legal) currency on the secondary market. Due to this neglect, however, there are problems with fraud, including non-delivery of paid-for product and false claims of non-delivery resulting in reversals of PayPal payments.