Creating Darkmoon Cards Part 1 of X

Darkmoon card trinket sellers generally come in one of two groups:

• Glyph makers selling cards as a use for surplus inferno inks, and
• Dedicated card sellers, producing surplus blackfallow inks.

I am firmly in the first group.  There will be other players out there that love darkmoon card sales.  However as I read a lot of blogs, and can't point to a recent set of posts, I will write this up.

First, I create inferno inks out of my glyph making process.  When I originally wrote that I was posting glyphs in the evening with a deep undercut method on a single faction's AH.  Today, I am playing less, and posting glyphs in the morning on two factions AH.

This post is covering the very basics of making Cataclysm darkmoon trinkets.  Future posts will be covering more details. (Peanut gallery - you will be invited to argue about optimising costs & sale prices in later posts).

While card creation can be profitable, it does take an ability to run a large stockpile.

All prices below are taken from theunderminejournal.com - average mean price of both horde and alliance servers at 30 June 2011.

An individual card takes 10 inferno inks @ 38g + 30 Volatile life @ 9g (disregarding 1 Parchment @55s)  = 650g.
Each Cataclysm deck takes 8 cards to make @ 650g = 5440g.

There are 32 possible cards - Ace to Eight:

• Of Stones.  This makes a tanking trinket - seems to be generally unloved, and mean price 5090g
• Of Waves.  This makes a healing trinket - apparently Best In Slot for Holy priests (even in 4.2) and OK for other healers, mean price 14,890g
• Of Embers.  This makes a caster DPS trinket - apparently Best in Slot for many casters (even in 4.2), mean price 10,720g
• Of the Winds.  This makes either a Strength DPS trinket or an Agility DPS trinket.  Mean prices about the same at 9,226g

This means that the mean price of all Cata darkmoon trinkets is 9990g or about 90% profit on top of costs

However, there are other issues with these cards that I will explore in later posts.

• You don't get to chose which card you will make.  You might have 50 individual cards yet still not be able to make a trinket.
• You can only make them 1 week every month
• They have huge price variations (sometimes it's better to sell mats).
• Like other 359 epics, they will suffer depreciation.

Postscript : In response to a comment below, I have added this image (can't add an image in a comment).  This is a snapshot from my server's Allaince AH taken today for the volcano trinket.  In all the pricing above I used the average of 'US Alliance Mean' and 'US Horde Mean' from two days ago.