This is one Hayden Hawke’s gold making tips from October, she providers her users weekly tips that are both extremely valuable and appropriate for the changing times in WoW. There is no better way to get ready for the upcoming patches and expansion than to check out Hayden Hawke’s Secret Gold Guide.
Darkmoon Cards are among the top few high end items in Cataclysm. You’ll see decks/trinkets selling for 15-20,000 gold on most realms, right behind Vial of Sands and other new BoEs from raids. Darkmoon Trinkets are iLvl 359 and are among the very best trinkets available in the game. The best part is, it can cost as little as a few thousand gold to complete a Darkmoon Deck. Check out the tips below to better understand Darkmoon Cards.
Basics
There are 8 cards in each deck, Ace through Eight. For example, to make a Tsuanmi Deck you would collect and combine Ace of Waves through Eight of Waves. You can sell the deck or turn it into a powerful iLvl 359 trinket by completing a simple Darkmoon Faire quest. You can only complete this quest during the faire. The resulting Trinket can also be sold for a lot of gold, especially when the faire is not going on. Cards AND Decks sell on the auction house for a lot of gold to the right buyers. Sing cards can be more difficult to sell. Aces are usually the most expensive and rare.
Trading
Scribes are the only folks who can make the decks (more below), but anyone can buy the cards, combine them, and turn them into trinkets. You can buy cards and and decks between faires and try to sell them at the beginning of the faire. This faire season, Tsuanmi Decks were selling for 15,000 gold during the faire and around 10,000 after the faire. This is a month long investment that often works very well for traders. You can also buy trinkets during the faire and then sell them between faires. Both of the strategies are very risky. See ‘timing’ below for more information on price trends.
Creating Cards
Scribes make cards by combining a hand full of inks and volatile. Each time they perform this craft, they receive a random card. That’s right, a random card. Each card requiest 10 Inferno Ink, 30 Volatile Life and a Resilient Parchment to make (See: Darkmoon Card of Destruction).
Volatile Life, in such large quantity, can get expensive. Note that many players will wait until the beginning of the Darkmoon Faire to collect Volatile Life and drive the prices up. You can find Volatile Life at their cheapest prices and highest quantities in between faires. Volatile Life sells between 3 gold and 12 gold on most realms, so you’re looking to spend 100-400 gold for enough Volatile Life to craft a single random card.
Inferno Ink ranges between 15 gold and 50 gold, so it would cost you between 150 and 500 gold to get enough ink to craft a single card. You can also mill your own Burning Embers (2 of these turn into an Inferno Ink) from Cinderbloom, Whiptail or other cheap level 85 herbs. Usually, Inferno Ink prices are only a little higher than the amount it costs to buy the herbs and mill them yourself. If you want to make dozens of Darkmoon Cards you’ll want to buy and mill your own herbs, as well as buy Volatile Life over several days/weeks to avoid driving prices up. If you mill your own herbs you may be able to sell the Ashen Pigment/Blackfallow Ink to help cover the costs of the herbs.
The total to make a single card would be 250 gold to 900 gold. Based on the prices above you might make out well enough buying mats off the auction house on normal prices. You can push prices down even further if you get only the lowest prices on items, waiting for farmers to liquidate their harvest and find Scribes who only sell glyph and need to get rid of a lot of Inferno Ink really often.
Like with any strategy, it will be highly dependent on your realm and the people already doing it. If a few players are already buying herbs and volatiles to make cards, the prices will represent their activity and competition. Take a look at prices and start small. The big gold here is if you can make many dozens of cards at once. This requires a lot of gold and patience but is one of the BEST ways to make gold in Cataclysm.
Prices
If you are just getting started with Darkmoon Cards, do some research on what the decks and trinkets are worth. Search for “Darkmoon Card” in the auction house, search on The Undermine Journal and WoWEcon to get more information on prices. If you’re going to craft these cards, make sure you’re very familiar with the prices of the materials needed and only buy those materials at competitive prices.
Timing
The timing and prices of Darkmoon Cards is dependent on the Darkmoon Faire. Darkmoon Cards (not the trinkets) will drop in value right after the faire and their prices won’t start to come up again until a few days or a week before the faire. The cards are practically useless until the faire opens up every month. For a schedule of the faire check out your in game calendar.
On the other hand, the trinkets will hold strong throughout the month before the faire is open and drop in price when the faire opens. This is because you can’t make a new trinket until the faire is open. The best selling timing is to sell cards when the faire opens and the trinkets when its closed. You might find a different strategy to work on your realm though. Search The Undermine Journal for ‘Deck’ and then look at the different decks to see what they did from Sep 4-Sep 10 when the faire was last available.
Selling
When you’re selling high end items that are priced in the many thousands, its always a good idea to advertise in trade chat. Many players don’t realize that they want what you have to sell and when you provide them a link of what they could have, this gets them excited. Get them to send you a message with an offer price if possible and tell them you’re undercutting players on the auction house (even if you’re not sure).
Remember, if you sell via the auction house you will pay a 5% cut, which is 500 gold for a 10,000 sale price and 750 gold for 15,000.
Price Inflation
If you are the only one selling the item, post it on the auction house with a different character and advertise from the character you spend the most time on. You can say things like “So and so is selling it for so much on the auction house, I’ll undercut him by 2,000 gold!” This will create the illusion of a great deal (which it is) and help set the stage for negotiations.
Risk
Darkmoon Cards are not for the faint of heart. You will be taking some risk and hoping for the right cards to complete your decks. You can get shafted and you can get really lucky. Chances are you’ll do just fine and if you invest enough (10s of thousands) you’re almost guaranteed to make a huge profit. This isn’t for the new gold maker who has 5,000 gold to play with. If you’re broke, follow the other strategies in the gold guide until you have a more formidable sum of gold.
These tips were written by Hayden Hawke, check out her: Secret Gold Guide for more great ways to make gold.