According to Wikipedia, an ecological trap is a scenario where rapid environmental change leads organisms to settle in poor-quality habitats that appear to be safe based on previous cues. 

And before you ask, yes, I did learn the phrase 10 minutes ago while researching this post because I swear there was a snappier phrase for this when I was watching Animal Planet as a kid. 

This feels like an absurd metaphor for anything related to MS or churning, but absurd metaphors are what we do around here, so let’s dive in. 

I wouldn’t even be writing this post if a certain group of civil servants or small dogs (or ideally both, since I took the over) could hit a trey to save their lives. But I also wouldn’t be degenning on mid-major basketball if I had unlimited capacity for other things. 

But with each passing week, we’re losing the kind of things that allowed you to allocate your capacity in a way that wasn’t a ton of extra work. And with that desire we all have to continue having a mysterious source of income, the metaphorical MS herd is being driven to harsher conditions. 

It’s all fun and games when the play is just clicking “Buy”, or “Send”, or “Add Money”. Yes, there are risks that I’ve blabbed about ad nauseam. But situations where you truly lose your money and don’t just give an annoyingly long interest-free loan are few and far between. 

Once you click that button, the loop is complete, and most of the time, the only real risk is that the transaction doesn’t actually earn anything, which is far from the end of the world. 

The only thing you really needed for many of the big plays of the last couple years is the right card and the right knowledge, and that was part of the problem. 

The only constant is change, and that phrase is never truer then in this hobby. But while we joke that MS is dead, there’s plenty of avenues that will always be around. That’s because they involve increased friction. You may have lost the ability to click a button and earn money in a certain way, but there are methods that are still out there, and will remain out there. 

How much friction is involved depends on your method. Is filming yourself packing a box too much? Social engineering with a grocery store manager? How about meeting in a Walmart parking lot in New Jersey? Or in my case, subjecting myself to Southern Conference basketball when I could have been doing anything else, then losing the bet anyway. 

Honestly, none of those things are all that difficult, but they all require effort, knowledge, or some charisma to do well at any type of scale in a way that many of the recent dead plays did not. 

And to me, some of them are hard to even categorize as straight MS, which is semantics, but worth talking about as you wade into what may be uncharted territory for you.

Good ‘ol street MS is the exception, because what you’re buying can be redeemed for exactly what you paid for it, give or take a couple bucks. If it can’t be, we’ve got bigger fish to fry than redeeming a stack of Staples VGCs. 

Buyers groups are fairly stable with some prominent outliers, but in my eyes, that’s running a small resale business that happens to rake in points on inventory purchases. Fire Stick jokes aside, there is counterparty and theft risk involved that makes it different than sitting on a pile of gebits. 

Then, we have gambling. Whether it’s gambling that you know the PM market and waiting to ship or wagering on legals or prediction markets, it’s a viable way to redirect your recently freed capacity. 

But gambling isn’t MS. While the game of exploiting inefficiency is the same, your MS knowledge serves more to help you earn some of the edge back or find other smart people to collaborate with. 

If you’re reading this, you’re still at it after a tough few months (and years) and you’re likely trying to evaluate what’s next while you wait for whatever is the next big thing on the MS horizon.

I think any of the options I just laid out are perfectly fine ways to allocate your resources right now, but I do think you need to do your homework if you’re going to take it seriously. 

And that’s where the absurd metaphor comes into play – the last era of MS made a lot of us feel like nothing we touched would go wrong, because it was so rare that it did. But it feels like an ecological trap to assume that being good at MS means you’ll be just as good as something that is adjacent to MS.

The bet that was the catalyst for this post was far from the first bet I’ve lost, trust me on that. But it happened at a funny time when things are dying. 

I cherry picked that game out of a slate from someone that was much more knowledgeable than me instead of spreading the risk and playing all of them, and I would have been in the green if I had. But then you wouldn’t get this long rant, so that’s cool. 

There’s still money to be made, but in the interim, I’d recommend being more discerning than you may normally be when evaluating opportunities and keeping in mind that “capital risked” isn’t the same as “capital temporarily unavailable”. When the free money spigot is closed, it can lead to you doing some things you may normally not do. 

But I’m a degen at heart, and the NBA is back from yesterday’s election hiatus. Let’s get to it. 

Nuannaarneq!

Pictured: fittingly, one of my all time favorite strips from one of my all time favorite comics – Foxtrot