The team challenge was announced last week. Greg, Stephen, and I will each take 3 card welcome bonuses and use them to plan the most amazing trip possible. Here, you can read more about that. The most challenging part of the challenge is our Drafting the Dream credit card draft which is coming up this Wednesday at 9pm Eastern on our Youtube channel. How the draft will work, the rules we have set, and thoughts about strategy will be detailed in this post.
A reader suggestion to include a fantasy draft into the next challenge is the basis of this exercise. We can each end up with an entirely unique set of credit cards with which to work by drafting cards and taking one card out of play.
There are basic rules.
In order to use their welcome bonuses to plan an epic trip, each of us will have to pick our dream team of 3 credit cards. We won't apply for these cards in real life, as we already have most of the cards that we'll be selecting. The purpose of this challenge is to show what can be done with just 3 credit card welcome bonuses. The purpose of our selections in the draft is to determine how many points and miles we can use as we plan our trips.
The Capital One Venture card is one of the cards that a participant could choose. The participant could use the rewards to plan the trip.
The participant will have used $12K of spending to meet the welcome bonus requirements so they can put their final $3,000 on the card of their choice. A total of 89K Capital One miles would be earned if they put that spend on the Venture card.
$285 of the $1,000 budget on annual fees will be used by the above participant, leaving them with the above points and $715 to book flights, hotels, and other modes of transportation.
We will host a live draft on Youtube on June 22nd at 9pm Eastern time in order to determine which set of cards we will have. Greg, Nick, Stephen, Carrie, and Tim are going to be on the stream. Tim will give live commentary. Carrie will keep us up to date with budget decisions.
Each person will get two minutes to make each pick, with commentary and analysis from Tim in between. Carrie will give an update at the end of every round.
Each of us will pick a card from the Best Credit Card offers page. Other participants may not pick the same card because it belongs to the person who picked it.
The order of card selection in each round will be reversed by us. The order of selections will be listed.
The purpose of the snake draft is to keep one participant out of last place. The results of the 40K to Far Away challenge gave us the order of selections. I busted the budget and finished third in that competition. The order of our finishes has been changed.
This format is intended to create obstacles and challenges. One person can't open multiple ultra-premium cards because of the budget. The snake draft gives Greg and I the chance for back-to-back picks without fear of the next card being taken by someone else. The assumption is that the strategy may change based on which cards have been taken by the previous player.
The assumption is that I will have to take the Amex Platinum card with the first pick. The welcome bonus provides enough points for a round-the-world trip in business class. 156,000 points can be used to book multiple of the Amex sweet spots.
Knowing that Greg and Stephen are likely to want to use Hyatt redemptions for hotel stays, I am very tempted to take one of the top Ultimate rewards cards. None of us is likely to pick the Ink Business Preferred since the 15k spending requirement would mean that our other selections are not likely.
If I take the Platinum card with pick #1, I believe Greg and Stephen will take the rest of the cards.
Stephen will either change plans on the fly and take the Platinum card or be certain to scoop up the next-best UltimateRewards if I take a Chase card with pick #1. Stephen would be stuck without Chase points if he took the Platinum card.
If I took the Chase Ink Business Unlimited with Pick #1 and Stephen took the Ink Business Cash with Pick #2, Greg would need to choose between the Reserve or the preferred card.
The annual fees on the Sapphire Reserve and the Platinum card would exceed the budget if I took the preferred card. If one of them takes the Platinum card, they will need to choose the preferred card in order to transfer points to partners. The points from the Ink Cash would not be transferrable to partners without the preferred status. One person couldn't get the welcome bonuses on an Ink card and the Platinum card because they had to spend at least $6,000 on the card in order to be eligible.
Even if someone wanted to have the Platinum card and an Ink card just to redeem Ultimate rewards points for cash back, those two cards will have used almost all of their introductory spending capacity with two cards. The third card selection would have to be less than $1500. They would be stuck without being able to transfer Ultimate rewards points to partners if they took both the Ink Cash and the Ink Unlimited. I was wondering if I could get one of the Ink cards with my second round pick. Is it possible that one of them will pass on the Platinum card and leave it for me to pick it up at the end of the second round? I think that if I pick the first card, things will get interesting.
If participants can demonstrate that they can get the offer to populate during the live stream, they will be allowed to choose an alternate offer. If I could share my screen and show the ability to apply for the Amex Business Gold card, I could take that one and save a few hundred dollars in annual fees.
I hope the fact that they won't know which card I'll take until a little after 9pm on Wednesday night has them planning for contingencies.
We will be live on June 22nd at 9PM. Join us to see what happens when you subscribe to our channel and enable notifications.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
