I was lucky to spend the last couple of weeks in the Caribbean (including the truly great Hermitage Bay) so I tried to be at least somewhat unplugged and not spend too much time thinking about churning and MS. More on that trip at some point in the future, but for the one sentence summary – Hermitage Bay is one of the very few churning hotels that lives up to the hype, and I can’t think of a better way to use a Hilton FNC.

Regardless of how much I tried to avoid spending much time on churning the last couple of weeks, since it is 2025, the gods of MS had to deliver one more volley before the year ended, and I ended up thinking about it more than I wanted to. 

Since banks love to use vague blanket wording that is approved by their legal team, nobody really knows for sure if this is as big of a blow as it seems to be or not. But regardless, this is another good example of not spending too much time worrying about things that are 100% out of our control, and we’re just going to have to wait and see (and start probing for alternative options). 

But what do you have control over as more and more plays die and limits are imposed? You can’t change the downstream effect of a dead play, shutdown, or something similar. But you can start working on the diversification and creative thinking that is clearly going to be required to thrive in 2026. 

A lot of people were one trick ponies the last few years, and I don’t blame them. Why deal with things like the volatility of precious metals or the time suck of buying gebits if you didn’t need to? But as more and more people flocked to mindless couch MS, the writing was on the wall that it wasn’t going to be sustainable for long.

And with the spigot of endless points starting to be turned off for many, there’s going to be quite a bit of attrition coming in the near future. For example, I frequently see people asking how to meet Amex SUBs in this current state. There’s many different ways that are still alive, and plenty of them aren’t remotely secret. 

You just need to pop on your collared shirt, grab a box of cookies, and don your social engineering hat. But for a cohort that never did that, that seems more daunting than it really is. I say this not to belittle people that haven’t done these things – it’s more of a push to evaluate things like street MS that were here way before this current era, and will be for quite awhile after. 

I fully expect MS to be trickier in 2026, but I also think that there will be plenty of opportunity out there for people who are willing to do some creative thinking to figure it out. More importantly, you won’t be hitting a method that’s also being hit by every rando who saw a reddit ad and joined a Substack anymore. 

Anyway, as my friend (and guest poster) Will memed it, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. I’ll let you decide for yourself where you think we are in this sequence, but I’m optimistic that we’re closer to another beginning of the cycle than recent news would make it appear. 

But to get back to those good times, we’re going to have to get through some hard times first. There’s still a universe of plays out there to be hit, you just need to know where to look (and do some probing of your own). The next big thing isn’t going to be spelled out verbatim for beginners in a Substack post. 

我们都会漂浮在水面上。