Originally Posted by sdsearch

They stopped the latter (buliding your way to lifetime platinum) in Dec 2011. They never had any way to get annual status (platinum or EXP) from credit card spend before.

There's a $450 annual fee (not waivable) AA MC "World Elite" card which can help a little bit with elite status. But it's not clear to me that it can help more than $450 worth of MRs (especially in January 2012!) would...