Never use it aside from a few times where I am curious what it is and how it works. The amount of commitment you have to invest into this seems not worth the poor risk/reward ratio it has.
TLDR:
1.use spying, spies and their passive intel gathering talents to push your black market contact influence, which helps a ton in black markets
2. Gather a gorram load of contacts using merchants but, also, e-tech and explorer with their "passive" contact finding talents.
3. You can shrug off many of the red cards both on black market but also spying and many operations in general. The right talents makes that even more easier.
4. Sell rare trade goods on black market for max profits.
5. While you're at it,make sure to bootleg your profits.
6. For point 5, the "retrain" button is now your best friend.
7. use explorer to gather large cache of goods and bootleg them on markets.
8. Make a stupidely huge amount of money by combining all this. Enjoy
9. I am not the best or an expert at the game and I still find black market stupidly good
10. EDIT: I am still in the process of refining this strategy for a future run
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When I started my first few games, I was like you. It seemed like a poor risk/reward venture as you put it.
it's when I started fiddling with the (very good) merchant guides on steam that I was finally able to crack up the code on how to use, and, sometimes, literally abuse the black market.
Before I start, as a side note:
I am far from being as experience in the game as many people on this board I suspect but I've got a solid 100+ hours into the game.
The second point is, that I seem to appreciate the black market game much more with a merchant run than a combat oriented one.
So, how to do that properly and relatively quickly you might ask?
When starting: A smuggler captain can net you additional credits when selling in the black market due to the starting trait. Important to note ... but not essential as you can do without.
Also, aside from having smugglers on your ship, the other type of crewman you will need are spies ... yes spies.
You see, the primary success/reward factor in the black market is the contact influence. For what I saw, it seems to peak up at around 65 influence. When you reach that point, even a single smuggler that can replace a risk card can give you 80% of accessing the market with the last card not coming with any real negative consequences.
So, influence of the contact is key. And the fastest and easiest way I have found to do that is by selling intel to them (at least those who buy them). All regular smuggler contact will buy them from what I see by the way. So, to do that, you'll need around 3-4 spies.
Not only do they help in spying operations, after a while, they can passively have a chance to automatically gather intelligence on any planet you land in.
Then sell the influence and reap the contact influence reward making the black market access closer to a walk in the park.
For the black market card and any other card game in ST:F, there are a few red cards which actually don't have much of a negative influence ... especially with the right talents.
All red "damage crew" and "damage ships" can be shrugged off easily by either a roll or a save talent. And, whether you save or not, you will generally gain XP for your crew, always useful especially for short operations like spying.
The red "crew death" cards can be auto-saved by a level 5 doctor talent and also come with a regular roll save from what I see. And ships encounters can easily be negated to nothing thanks to combat avoidance talents.
As it turns out, smuggler crewmen in a group of 3 ,4 or more depending on your taste is one of the best thing to have to avoid ship combat.
Dubious handshake shrug off any smuggler encounter. Forged permit and the like military, zealot and bounty hunters. And, with a combination of bribes and enough such talent uses, you can even get easy reputation to get access to handshake, leaving the encounter peacefully and with additional faction rep to boot!
Now, another important point is have more than one black market contact. In fact, the more the better. it's fact, you can never ever have too much. And to get really crazy, should you have regular smuggler contact on EVERY planet (utopic okay) you could ... well ... make stupid amount of money while bypassing the local laws.
Which means you will need to get a lot of contacts to do that ... a looooottttt of contacts!!
How to do that easily might you wonder?
Well, any one will tell you that merchant are very good for that, especially early game. But, wait! There are two classes which can do that even better: namely explorer and e-tech.
Both have access to a talent similar to "secret unbound" from the spy ... except that instead of passively gathering intelligence every time you land, you gather new contacts.
E-tech get that as a level 8 talent for regular planets and explorer at level 5 talent for wild zones.
Just having 3 or 4 e-tech and doing some short detours to land on planets will garner you a stupid amount of contacts. Using explorer the same way but for wild zone ditto (though you have to do more detours). So, make sure you stack up enough safe landing like talents to make landing as fast and cheap as possible and reap the rewards of "passive on landing" talents
Speaking of explorers, they mix well with the black market ... and not just for xeno artifacts. You see, at high enough level, you get a talent to change a risk card into a rare trade good card (albeit sometimes wiht a pirate fight) ... and various other more regular goods that you can sell in, again, the black markets.
I still need to tweak my strategy on that, but it seems that creating big stashes and then, only then, selling them on the black market and bootlegging them seems the way to go to maximize profit in the black market.
Now, speaking of this, and the black market talent of the smuggler crewmen, some important things to note:
Bootlegging good sold on the black market can net significantly higher profits. First, all black markets start with an in built 10 or 15% (I believe) (EDIT: just checked the wiki, profits when selling is 25%, acutally
) when selling goods. Starting as a smuggler captain another ten. And bootlegging add another 20% plus negotiate skill. Yeah ... that can be a lot.
And if you can make 100% sure it triggers when selling a lot, lot of rare trade goods ... oh wow !!! ... the profits are nothing short of stupidly, insanely high !!
Which leads me to next point, and that is smuggler talents triggered on making trades on the black market. You remember that "retrain" button? Well, if you want to use black market to sell rare trade goods and make really huge profit, that "retrain" button has just become your new best friend!!
Just use it on every smuggler crew, officer, captain that have undesirable talents that trigger on on black market trades, make sure you have enough bootlegging talents active and ... voilà !! 100% chance to bootleg profits on these particular sales !! (unless something terribly bad that I have yet to foresee happens ... remember, I am not as experience as many of you guys on ST:F).
I could go on, but that's becoming a really long post.
Enjoy !
*yet another gorram EDIT* : I think my super easy access to black market, which I didn't see, is also that I have a non-combat captain with A in attributes and all the attributes that aren't used in combat, making black market safer. Also making it safer are the spies that I have added to my crew mix, increasing total stealth pool which, again, is very useful for black market. (though you really don't need super high level crew to actually very safely access it on a very regular and constant basis).
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