The biggest lure at the moment are sign on bonuses. Many banks try to limit this by requiring large spend. You are spending nearly 6K/mo, so you should be able to defuse any and all of them. I would plan to cycle through various cards throughout the year and hit the spend then basically move on (except for category spend incentives).

After a short while you'll have a huge trove of points which will help you deal with the flip side of large sign on bonuses - capacity controls. Specifically it will help you to have points in a variety of programs so you can pull from different wells if you can't find the reward you want in the program you are in.

The ultimate rewards and the SPG programs are nice for solving capacity controls, as they each have a variety of transfer partners at a FAIR exchange rate (1:1 or 1:1.25). But you leave points on the table if you don't grab new sign on bonuses from time to time. Similar, the so called category bonuses (e.g. Ink's 5X on office supply/telecom) are quite lucrative.

Many here will get a bunch of cards at once, but if that complicates things too much there is no reason you can't grab a card and move on to the next one at a slower pace. This will also likely be gentler on your credit score than folks (eh, like me) who get 5 cards at a time.

The latest deals are cataloged here and its mostly up to date. Often folks here find deals better than the ones you'll get if you go to the banks website, so check there first.

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/miles...er-thread.html