Questions about Steam Sales

Is there a known date for when it will begin?
June 22nd/23rd I think

What is the best card-trading bot system or site, and what's the easiest way to trade for full sets?
ASF and STM

How will Steam's recent changes to gifts affect things? Can we really no longer buy games to gift?
You can still gift them but it has to be sent to them directly. They can on the other hand, store it in their inventory if they choose to.

As far as your other questions, I am not knowledgeable yet to answer those.

What is the best use of full card sets before and during a sale?

That depends. If you wait until the week before a sale you will (usually) start getting 'mystery cards' that are the card for the sale event if there is one. You can usually sell these on the market for a decent price then buy back your cards later at a lower price, giving you the cards you would have gotten plus some profit to buy games with.

I usually wait until the sale starts just in case there is an event like the summer adventure from a few years ago. Not that there has been :(

What is the best card-trading bot system or site, and what's the easiest way to trade for full sets?

Try Steam Card Exchange and Steam Trade Matcher. They do get clogged up during sales though so they will be a bit slow.

Thanks for this thread, I was thinking of asking several of those questions, mainly the ones regarding cards and crafting badges (not sure if it's best to craft badges during Steam sales.

You can only buy games to gift right away .
You cannot store gifts in your inventory anymore.

As for the cards ..no clue .. I never craft badges , seems like waste of money so I just sell them whenever I get them .

Heya if you wanna know all Steam sales you can check this site.
They always say not confirmed but in most cases it is the right date

I'm sorry for not having an answer to your other questions, I'm not that into knowing all about cards and bots

Cards? It's you againts world, who knows ¯_(ツ)_/¯

How will Steam's recent changes to gifts affect things? Can we really no longer buy games to gift?

You can if you don't buy on Steam.
If you buy on Steam chances are you can't, due to the restrictions imposed by valve (the person has to be in your friend list, and in a region where there is not more than ¿10%? of difference in the game price with respect yours).

Sale is useless for me =/ No gifts =/

Additionally, what's the best userscript for greasemonkey that helps manage steam inventory? I'm out of town, and I have a good one on my desktop, but I'm having trouble finding it so that I can use it with my laptop.

I notice that the mystery cards are dropping now, but only sell for around 8 cents. Is this the most we can expect for them, or better to list higher in the hopes that they will spike in price once people can craft with them?