Note for the youngins: I don’t actually love plays dying, go watch this old classic

February 1 brought some bad news in the churning world. While it’s a pretty big deal that affects a lot of us, I think we can peg this as one last “screw you” provided by 2025, since it was announced all the way back in December.

I think a lot of us didn’t believe that a company infamous for its terrible IT would actually succeed at implementing this change, but they probably had Claude figure it out since no humans that work there seem to be able to.

In a vacuum, this one sucks pretty bad. It was one of those widespread plays where the only people who weren’t affected had already been shutdown for having too much fun riding their bike. 

The play ensured that “the math mathed” for expensive couch MS, made street MS very much worth the time, and even kept this issuer top of wallet for a ton of organic spend. 

But while it has been around for eons in MS years, it wasn’t the key to early retirement outside of very isolated, stroke of luck cases that most of us didn’t have access to. 

The greater issuer ecosystem guard rails ensured that this dead play was a very nice extra bonus, but ultimately, it was just that – an extra bonus. It made things like MSing status a no brainer, but it wasn’t scalable on a true whale level like Amex or other issuers are.

One of the only windows they gave us to make truly meaningful amounts of profit in the ecosystem slammed shut even faster than I expected (and was likely one of the straws that broke the camel’s back anyway).

It’s ok to be sad, pissed, or both that we lost this one. I certainly am. 

But this is just the latest interment into the MS graveyard driven by overexposure – we need to get used to it, because it’s going to continue.

The low hanging fruit that didn’t require a foundation of knowledge (or in some cases, common sense) is all but gone thanks to being force fed to anyone willing to pay a nominal fee.

This might be the copium talking, but isn’t there an obvious silver lining on the flip side of this play dying? Veteran MSers will be the first to tell you that this environment wasn’t sustainable, and we were long overdue to cull the herd. 

It sucks to lose something easy, but it sucks much worse when you’re unwilling to put in the effort to find things that aren’t so obvious. There are a lot of people that are going to move away from the hobby, reducing the pressure on some of the things that are still alive and lowering the risk of making an ill-advised call to a target. 

As my friend the legendary Jen Taylor put it – there’s such a huge difference between finding something and gradually testing the limits vs providing a step by step script to anyone willing to subscribe to your Substack for a month. 

To the beginners who joined the game recently – it’s not your fault that you ended up here at this time. Honestly, I think this is a really interesting time to be a beginner. With massive attrition coming to the hobby soon, there will be room to learn and contribute in a way that was difficult to do in these last few noisy years. 

As always, there’s still plenty of avenues for profit, and new ones are being discovered daily. While this was the most high profile flavor of this play, it was just one of many, many targets offering it. 

For a positive example – the average whale is much more concerned about a different flavor of this play. However, that one has been pushed fully underground due to overexposure and overzealous churner contact with zero common sense. That play is still very much alive and kicking for smart people who planned ahead while being much more insulated from zero-effort scripts. 

So, let’s pour one out for what was an amazing run with amazing ROI, while being realistic that it was being shouted from the rooftops, and this was always going to be the end result. 

While some people will say that churning and MS are dead, I hope that means they’ll leave and make room for hungry newcomers that are willing to roll up their sleeves and do some probing. This is definitely one of the best times in the last few years to do so.

Enjoy having a few extra minutes back in each week now, and take this as a lesson to plan ahead when given the opportunity to do so. You’re all set, my friends.

Skál!