alright I’m gonna tell you how I got here and how you can print money with just basic ass inscription and a little hustle.
this profession is the most fun thing I’ve ever done in WoW. It feels a lot like poker sometimes. so, basically, inscription to 410 (whenever you get the ability to craft darkmoon card of the north) is the only pre-requisite here, and I’d recommend at least 5k gold to start out with this to prevent risk of ruin.
Starting out the expansion I only had a few hundred gold. While the rest of you were turbo leveling to 80 for no reason, I stayed in the auction house, studying. Early on there was big money from milling herbs at 50g/roll into icy pigments and azure pigments that would sell for 20-30% profit on your mill on average. It was easy to get started with a low amount of money doing that, especially with quest gold so available.
The funny thing was early on people didn’t realize that snowfall ink does NOT require 2x icy pigment. You can trade 10x ink of the sea (20x azure pigment) for 1 snowfall ink at the ink trader in dalaran. So, it made absolutely no sense for icy pigments to be going for 50 gold and snowfalls for 100 - you could trade in 20x azure pigments for 30 gold and sell the snowfall ink for 100. lots of money the first week doing that, til people finally figured out the ink trader. That was my first indication that this market’s REALLY soft compared to the pros on warmane.
So, I got the ability to make darkmoon cards and binked a few early to give me a nice little jump to a few K gold. You will want to do some math here, but basically, of the higher level herbs (icethorn, lichbloom, adder tongue), if you are milling it all yourself, it takes 3.94 stacks of the higher herbs and 5.725 of the lower ones to roll ONE darkmoon card. If you want to see how I got those numbers, I can share my spreadsheet with you privately.
Now, on my server, this is a bit interesting, because goldclover et al go for 1/2 of what the high level herbs go for. This is a market inefficiency, because as you can see from the numbers I laid out, it only requires 50% more stacks of herbs for the lower herbs, so I try to buy goldclover in bulk, which is typically very easy and cheap, especially at particular hours of the day I’ve learned is when bots dump their supply.
so, then you need to figure out the cost of a few things on your server:
1.) what is the floor price of a nobles card? How do I calculate this? Well, few ways and there will be a few different numbers here. I bought adder’s tongue at 1g/each today. 4 stacks of that was 80g. 3x eternal life costs 40g, and then the 3x ink of the sea is ~3g, plus 50s for the parchment. So we are rolling 1 card for 123.50 gold. Since nobles drop 25% of the time, I simply multiply that by 4 to figure out what I’m crafting a nobles card for in that moment. 494g a craft, which is EXCELLENT, because I know from watching AH these cards never ever fall below 600, and the bulk buyers always try to buy at 600 (which effectively sets the price). You will want a chat addon to go through trade chat logs and figure these things out, that was the only way I could do it.
2.) what is the floor price of completed noble deck? the raw noble deck gets bought for 6k currently on my server buy the bulk buyers. I see people in trade WTB it for 6.8 on the spot, and it goes for 7-7.5 on the AH. So, I can put the price around 6500 and probably reliably sell it. there are 8 cards, so 6500/8 = 812 per card. We’re crafting at 500g so we are absolutely pillaging it whether we sell the cards individually for that much (harder) or even if we sell for 6k to the bulk buyers. wonderful. note: the ace for some reason always goes for twice as much for the others, so expect that. It has the same drop chance (another hilarious inefficiency).
3.) what is the price of a turned-in nobles deck? for which stats? Right now the agi/str ones are going for 20k+ because the faire is out of town. when the faire comes back that price will tank, but when it goes away, it’ll shoot back up again. If you have a lot of gold, sitting on nobles decks is probably a great idea while they’re very cheap right now.
So you basically just spam cards at a good price point and trade duplicates to complete sets. Watch the nobles cards market because cards will just randomly spike in price - I sold a 7 for 1200g yesterday. Wild shit like that. Or, when you get duplicates, try to trade for cards at good prices and people will sometimes just pay the difference. For example, I needed a 5, and I had 3 sevens - the 7’s were going for 900g for some reason, and the 5 was going for 700. The guy just gave me the 200 difference even though on average these cards are worth exactly the same.
The “junk” cards sell from 10-100g each depending on demand and how lucky you are so just throw them on the AH and they inevitably sell for some reason, which further increases your profit, because I calculate them as total losses in my EV calcs, so it’s free money if I can sell them.
Good luck!
Note: this is a horde megaserver prices. I have a contact on benediction and the market is very similar for him, but everything is cheaper on my server still. I expect the amount of bots you have on your server may make what I am doing completely impossible or very easy.
