• Trade MTGO cards effectively and efficiently.golden dragon image by Dmitry Grishin from Fotolia.com
  
  Since the inception of "Magic: the Gathering Online" (MTGO), the online version of Wizards of the Coast's Magic: the Gathering card game, trading the cards has become an efficient and popular means to build creative and economical decks to play with online. MTGO brought tens of thousands of players together, any of whom could be online at any given time looking to trade cards. This eventually brought about the development of new websites, systems and forums in an attempt to make a good trading system better.
  
  

Create a Wish List

• To efficiently search the MTGO Marketplace for the specific cards you need to build a deck or decks, use the deck editor to create an artificial deck named "wishlist." Begin by un-checking the "My Cards" check box. This will show all available MTGO cards. Search for the cards you are looking for and put them into your new deck. The cards you do not own will remain in red type in the deck editor until you own them.
  
  After initiating a trade with another player or a Bot in the Marketplace, click on the "Load Wish List" button and load the artificial deck. Any cards available will show up in the "You get" column of the trade.
  
  

Free Trading Bots

• In the MTGO Marketplace, there are several "Bots" that offer free cards. Some will offer 60 cards one time for the life of your account. Others will offer 50 free cards per month. These cards are always commons, inexpensive and easy-to-get cards. The companies and individuals behind these Bots give these cards away for the goodwill of the game and in hopes that you will visit their other Card Bots, which are not free. This is a great way for new players to build up their common cards and for veteran players to find cards they are looking for occasionally, too.
  
  

Trading Forums

• MTGO Forums are online venues where many ideas are exchanged, including deck building and card trading. In these forums, individuals will post their "Want List" and their "Have List." If you have something they need and they have something you are looking for, or at least would be willing to trade for, the next step is to contact them to arrange to "meet" on MTGO to execute the trade. Look for forums that have a user reference system that rewards honest usage of the forum.
  
  

Online Trading Systems

• When a player is looking for "just that one card" to finish a deck, he may find himself clicking and searching through the MTGO Marketplace for hours. The development of trading systems such as the MTGO Library enables the user to search for a specific card. When the card is found in the database, the system will report which, if any, users on the MTGO Marketplace have that card for sale or trade in their collections. Simply "cut and paste" the user name into the Marketplace search box, initiate a trade with that user and search his cards for the card.