Assuming your own one of these already... if you're the kind of person who makes your shots count and shoots game well in range, then paying for bismuth in a classic gun will be economically advantageous for a considerable period over the acquisition cost of a new steel-capable gun. Plus, you are at a ballistic advantage using the bismuth also. You will still find that it has a certain range where it changes from an indomitable duck-slayer to more-or-less ineffective, but all shotguns seem to have that threshold somewhere. The bismuth will take that further than steel, tungsten-polymer just slightly farther, and pure tungsten way out there.
If you don't spend a considerable amount of time and money on clays leading up to the season, and/or you find yourself blasting away at improbable shots, you might find the economy to change against your favour. When we had days where I was off my game, things added up to a considerable expense over the reward. On the other hand, the good days could be quite exceptional. The best example of that was a day where a four-man duck limit was shot, and upon cleaning the ducks we found that I had shot all of them with my tungsten-matrix #5's and none of the steel shot from the other guys were present. While that is easy to blame on the ammo, it is also relevant that I had been shooting skeet all fall and my partners had not. I don't think that I am naturally a better shot than them, but the practice seemed to pay off.
So the moral of the story is that making shots count using shells of a high cost, backing that up with more of an expense in cheap practice, is an effective way to approach the waterfowl game. On the other hand, shooting more at a lot of waterfowl with cheap steel is another common strategy. The former is definitely my choice on how to proceed, but that is for more of an odd reason: I like my older over-under (and just now getting more into english doubles) better than most modern guns, and I had to make that work somehow. I figure that the cost of expensive ammo is cheaper than the cost of another gun (plus I get to hunt with the same gun that I become comfortable at skeet with), even though I am comfortable with he thought of buying a new semi if the price of bismuth ever took a sharp rise.
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