Gold in Darkmoon Cards

Each expansion has brought us Darkmoon Cards that are crafted by Inscriptionists which are then turned into Decks of Cards that become trinkets and have a ton of gold making potential.  This expansion is a little different though, in that Blizzard has limited our production of cards by using a Scroll of Wisdom for each card which has a 1 day cool down.  This has impacted the gold making potential from previous expansions severely.  I remember seeing a post on a blog where someone had made 1 million gold from these cards within 90 days of launch.  Well those days may be gone but there is a good market for potential profit if you are smart.

We know that the DMF hits every 30 days so that means that a scribe could make no more than 30 cards before the next fair.  There are 4 decks of cards that take 8 cards each which means you need 32 cards to complete all 4 decks.  Remember that these are random so this makes for interesting scribing!  

The obvious way to make gold is to mill Pandaren Herbs and craft them each day you make a Scroll of Wisdom.  But this gives us limited profits.  Right now most cards are selling for an average of 2,500 gold per card (Oxen cards sell for about 1,500 all others are averaging 3k).  I am able to find herbs for under 3g each or 60 gold per stack.  It takes about 7-8 stacks of herbs to get enough ink to create one card, using the ink vendor to trade inks up.  That means my cost per card is about 480 gold per card.  

Should you get lucky and get all 8 cards then you can create your deck which sells for much more than the cost of each card individually.  Right now, on my server, the decks are going for 40-50k per deck of cards, but the cards are going for less than 3 k each.  And this is how there is even more gold to be made.

I look for cards that get below 2,500 each and then buy them to fill the holes or just stock up for future decks.  Many of these I buy at only 2k so my average cost per deck is about 20k tops, most of them I can build them for less.  But the market is selling these for over 40k which means a nice double of my investment!

That tough part of this market is the price fluctuations, timing and supply.  If you are willing to buy up the low cost cards to build your decks then the supply usually does not back fill very quickly because of the cool down to make them.  A crafter cannot just buy several hundred stacks of herbs and make dozens of cards like the used to do, so this is causing the market to go up and down wildly.
Be patient and watch for the right time to buy and sell these cards, craft your decks and turn them in for the trinkets!  The trinkets (they can only get these after turning the decks in at the DMF) go for even more than the decks…so investing 20k can get you back 30k profit easy!
Good luck and happy hunting!

Cooking Up Gold in MoP

Let's go cook!  Before you start cringing at the thought of doing more repetitive tasks in the game, because doing a zillion dailies is not enough, relax I am talking about farming the Auction House for cooking materials!  Yeah! 

With the release of Mist of Pandaria, we were given a new way to level our cooking profession and we were given a farm to begin growing cooking materials.  Turns out that this is a necessity in the game because the materials have a very very low drop rate outside of farming.  These materials are needed to cook up buff food or feasts for raiding.  The other thing did Blizzard did, probably to make it more interesting, is that the gave us the ability to plant seeds that grow into non cooking materials, such as; enchanting materials, leather, cloth, etc.  Neat idea for those who are bored I guess.  But the kick for me is that we can also plant seeds to grow Motes of Harmony!

But wait a minute, if we use the plots to grow Motes of Harmony then how do we get our cooking materials?  The Auction House!  As many people have already discovered, there is a huge market that ha been created in the Auction House by selling cooking materials that are needed for all buff foods.  This is HUGE.  This market never even existed until MoP.  Sure, there was and still is the market for fish and meats to use in cooking, but this is totally new.

So what do I do and how do I make gold in this market?

First off I do not grow any cooking materials on my farm (unless it is an 85 alt that cannot do anything else), I grow Motes of Harmony.  These are of high value and I need them for crafting as well.  Like many others, I turn to the AH to buy cooking materials to cook up food and feasts.  Just like anything else sold in the AH, the prices are all over the board which means I can make some great gold in this market.

So far, I have only dabbled in it, not truly grasping the full impact that we have at our fingertips.  Now that I have, lookout!  I made probably 15k gold without even trying to in this market, what happens if I really apply my same flipping concepts to it?  What I like about this market is that people have limited amounts of supply, unlike fishing you cannot get some bot in the game that farms up 100 stacks of cabbage, therefore the market has a problem of limited supply versus high demand.  I will take advantage of this.

My plan:  Buy low, sell high.  I have 1 main competitor in this market and a few other small ones.  I want to take keep my sales at prices that move inventory (going for volume) but are still just under the price point of my main competition.   On my server, I see that the competitor has these items (Carrots, Cabbage, Melons, etc) all priced at about 25g each.  I will go for 24.99 each.  I will buy everything lower and relist at my price.  Some people are listing these for as little as 6g each, silly people!  More gold for me!

I post these in 2 increments, stacks of 5 and stacks of 50.  Those that are slowly leveling their cooking or just making food for rep quests will be buying stacks of 5 while others who want feasts will be stacks of 50.  Let's get both markets. The volume of sales tends to be good on most servers so make this a daily regiment.  I will spend about 10 minutes buying and posting. 

The goal for this method should net me an easy 50k in a month, check back to see if it happens!

Crafting PVP Gear Profits

New expansion has brought us new PVP gear and more profits!  So far in MoP, the demand for PVP gear has been all over the map.  In the first week of MoP I was selling about 12 pieces a day easy and for huge amounts of gold.  My average sale was 1500 for plate gear at a crafting cost of less than 150 gold!  I love those returns, of course they did not last for long but even now I see sales for about 500g on a cost basis of only 75 gold, so still great returns.

I did notice that folks are buying the gear to round out their PVE set so they can queue into LFR, so there are some decent sales right now.  I am averaging about 8 sales a day in just plate gear.  Cloth is my next venture as I usually do very well in cloth PVP sales but I need to get my Mage to 90 or at least get him some SoH to buy recipes.  Anyways, take a look at your server and see what pieces of gear make sense to sell, look for those pieces not listed or under supplied to the market and price accordingly.  Don't be afraid to mark it up high if no one else is selling it, but be prepared for competition as people find ways to spend their Spirit of Harmonies.

I would list these gear pieces for a 24 hour period so that you are ensuring that you look at the market and relist at the right price.  I can't tell you how many times I have found my competitors listing for 1 gold less than me, which is fine, but I want those sales.  Now if they are morons and sell it way to cheap, then wait them out and see if hey keep listing.  I find these types of sellers are just passing through the market, especially on weekends.  You could buy them out if they are cheap enough, but make sure you look to see if they are online first so they do not simply make more and list them at their dumb prices again.

PVP gems are not selling high enough as compared to the raw gems, but maybe it indifferent on your server so check it out!

As always, have a great time and farm that AH for profits!

Enchanting My Way to Gold

There are quite a few ways to make some serious gold with enchanting, today we will look at the new materials and enchants with the arrival of Mists of Pandaria.  Most of you who read my blog know that I do not like farming; in fact the only farming I do like is when I farm the Auction House.  Enchanting is no different.  Right now we have a highly fluctuating marketplace which is not unusual at the start of an expansion.  So how do we profit?

Enchanting materials are fast movers right now, with people wanting to enchant their new gear and others wanting to level their enchanting to max level as quickly as possible.  That gives us some opportunities in flipping materials such as; Spirit Dust, Mysterious Essence and Ethereal Shards.  I am skipping Sha’ Crystals for now as they are not really moving in volume yet.  There is one wrinkle to consider in the materials flipping; Enchanters can combine several items to upgrade, or they can degrade an item.  This is giving us a huge opportunity from time to time so that we can convert over supplied materials into undersupplied markets.

Here is a chart to examine the opportunity based on my server’s current prices:

Conversion Table	Qty		AH Price	Total Cost		Profit
Spirit Dust	x	5	3	15	= 1 Mysterious Essence	15
Mysterious Essence	x	5	30	150	= 1 Ethereal Shard	-80
Ethereal Shard	x	5	70	350	= 1 Sha' Crystal	-50
Sha' Crystal			300

Notice that creating Mysterious Essence can generate a nice 100% profit line while converting the other materials could be at a loss.  This may be different on your server as well so use your numbers to figure out where there is opportunity to profit.  This can also be deceiving, the model says we would lose 80 gold by converting 5 Mysterious Essences into 1 Ethereal Shard.  But what if we used 25 Spirit Dust at 3 gold each and converted them into 5 Mysterious Essence and then converted those 5 into 1 Ethereal Shard?  Our cost basis would be 75 gold with a current market price of about 70 gold so we lose 5 gold.

Why mention this?  Because the market is in flux so much that prices can go up and down fast and we want to be able to produce enchants for profit so we have to look at the cheapest method to do it.  The other night I went to make some enchants and the AH had Ethereal Shards going for 125 each.  But the weird part is that the Spirit Dust and Mysterious Essence’s were going for the same rate I listed above.  So using this conversion method I was able to produce Ethereal Shards for 75g by buying up all the dust at 3g or less and converting them into Mysterious Essence and then finally into Ethereal Shards.  I listed a few for sale and made some enchants.

Buying and flipping in this type of market is also volatile, be prepared to sit on mats sometimes because there is so much supply hitting the market and look for those times when supply is down.
Enchants can make some serious gold as well, but there are two ways to do it; Flipping enchants and crafting them.  Crafting them is simple once you have a maxed out enchanter, look for the enchants on the AH and determine which ones are selling for more than their materials.  Easy math and in some cases you can generate profits as much as 500% of the base cost to make them.  

But don’t forget to check out those enchants that are listed dirt cheap.  We have a ton of people still leveling their professions and some of these people will craft enchants and then list their products cheaply on the AH to get rid of them.  They are not worried about making a profit; they were only worried about maxing their profession.  This gives us a huge opportunity.  Some of these lower level enchants (level 550-590) may not be as popular but they can make some tidy profits.  I found 35 enchants on the AH the other night selling for1 gold to 2 gold each.  They used Mysterious Essence and Spirit Dust which means their cost to make was roughly 30-60 gold each.  Each person who listed them simply undercut the last person.

I bought them all and then relisted 10 of them at 50 gold each.  I sold 3.  Big deal?  Let’s do the math, I spent about 50 gold buying all 35 enchants and then sold 3 of them for 150 gold total which means I profited about 100 gold for doing nothing.  The price dropped again and now I have tons of these but so what?  I can do this again and even if I build up a supply of hundreds of these, I will still have made gold.  I can give these away to guildies or store them for later resale when the markets normalize.

Bottom line: Do not under estimate all of those really cheap enchants.  Many of these may be cheap only for the next few weeks while people dump their supply on the market.

Major Gold with Ghost Iron Ore

Those that did the Ore Shuffle in Cata will know this routine well, but if you did not do it or did not about it then you must read on...

There are many ways to make tons of gold in WoW, but the Ore Shuffle is one of my favorite and has HUGE payoff potentials.  As with anything I post here, research your server before diving in too deep!  So what is the shuffle?

On my server, Ghost Iron Ore is going for an average of 6g each or about 120g per stack.  I like to buy it whenever it falls below 5g ea or 100g a stack but the shuffle works fine even at 150g per stack. The following results are based on 100 stacks of Ghost Iron Ore and are my actual numbers:

Ghost Iron Ore Stacks to Prospect: 100 Price Per Stack: 150 Profit: 22,722 Profit % 151% Results of Prospecting Material Type % Qty Price Value Sparkling Shard Makes Serpent's Eye 119% 474 9        4,266 Pandarian Garnet Red Gem 23% 93 10           930 Alexandrite Green Gem 23% 93 3           279 Lapis Lazuli Blue Gem 28% 110 3           330 Roguestone Purple Gem 27% 106 5           530 Sunstone Yellow Gem 24% 94 3           282 Tiger Opal Orange Gem 27% 106 5           530 Primordial Ruby Red Gem 4% 16 225        8,000 River's Heart Blue Gem 5% 21 150        3,150 Sun's Radiance Yellow Gem 5% 18 185        4,950 Vermilion Onyx Orange Gem 4% 17 225        3,825 Wild Jade Green Gem 4% 15 300        2,250 Imperial Amethyst Purple Gem 5% 21 225        8,400
My outlay of about 15,000 gold returned all 15k gold PLUS a profit of $22,722!!!
These numbers are only the HALF of it though.  You could stop here and walk away with a tidy profit, or you can take it even further with your Jewelcrafter and Enchanter.  Instead of selling the uncommon quality gems, use them by making rings or necklaces.  These are iLvl 384 and worthless.  Send them to the Enchanter and disenchant them into enchanting materials.  From here, you can either sell the materials for profit OR make enchants and sell those in the AH.
When you make the rings/necklaces, you will get a proc for a rare item instead of the uncommon item.  These will sell in the AH and can net you about 500 gold each.
By crafting these and selling the rare quality rings/necklaces (rings seem to sell faster but necklaces go for more) I was able to net about 5k gold instead of the 1k for selling them.  Then by disenchanting the uncommon rings I was able to generate another 5k in enchant sales!  So 1k in materials returned me another 10k total!
Next step, craft the iLvl 450 rings and necklaces which mostly use the rare gems.  These can double your profits, but patience will be key as there are a lot of competitors in this market.  Using half of the rare gems, I was able to earn another 30k.
Bottom line:  I invested 15k and was able to turn this into 62k.  Not bad eh?

100k Gold in 10 Days of MoP!

So I have been busy in game and neglecting my followers for the blog, sorry.  Have no fear, I am posting again!  There is so much to cover that I find it difficult to sit down and write a post just because I don't even know where to start.  Overall, I have today that I truly love MoP over every other expansion which is far from what I thought of it when it was announced.  Blizzard has done a great job at developing content and lore that is unique and interesting.  So kudos!

On to the gold!

My first few days in game were spent leveling and learning all the new mini games with the game.  I didn't even start "farming" until day 4 and I found myself making 2k gold a day...pathetic.  So by day 6 of the expansion I decided to focus my efforts on gold again and after just 10 days I accrued over 100k in profits.

Stay tuned for some of the ways to make gold in MoP as I will post each day.  What you can expect:

The Ghost Iron Shuffle is awesome, awesome, awesome.  I will post about this tomorrow so stay tuned as I will share the ins and outs as well as what my actual profits were in this easy method.

Enchanting is making me about 7k gold per day and is simply better than expected based on the materials prices.

PVP gear is off to a huge start, selling about 10K gold per day.

Flipping materials has been a bit tougher due to several factors this expansion; the Cross Realm Zoning and the fast node spawning for ores and herbs.  I also see more people farming mats than ever before, possibly because it is so easy right now and the demand is high.  With that said, I am seeing an easy 5k profit per day here for 5 minutes work.

Cooking supplies that farm grown have been a huge gold maker.  I flip these mats each day and have seen profits of about 5k.

There is much more but stay tuned as we explores each of these methods in the following days

Stockpiling for MoP Part 6

We are almost at expansion day!  There is now so much to do in so little time, but we can still make some smart buys before it is too late.  Today I am looking at Cooking.  All of the new monks and Pandas will probably start to level up cooking at some point, either because they want the food buffs for raiding or they just want to level it because they can.  Either way, I see gold in our cooking future!

Once again, I go to one of my favorite sites, wow-professions.com and check out the mats needed to level from 1-525 and then start buying the materials while they are cheap.  This is another area where I see a huge potential.  I find that a lot of people will sell off their materials to a vendor because they do not want to store them, do not want to list them in the AH and/or do not want to level cooking so they just get rid of them cheap in the Auction House.

50 Clam Meat

50 Crawler Meat

50 Raptor Egg

50 Raptor Flesh

40 Bear Flank

40 Zesty Clam Meat

30 Buzzard Meat

35 Talbuk Venison

35 Clefthoof Meat

35 Warped Flesh

80 Rhino Meat

150 Shoveltusk Flank

190 Chilled Meat

70 Worm Meat

75 Bonescale Snapper

45 Highland Guppy

 

Mind you, this is not a complete list of items needed to level.  These are the mats I believe will be in demand and could return you some great gold.  I would be careful about investing too much in this though…Remember, in November everyone can level their cooking using the Holiday to purchase everything they need to level from vendors!

 

I still think this is a safe bet, but I would not go huge.

Stockpiling for MoP Part 5

Pandas, Monks, Panda Monks!  I can’t wait for my Panda Monk!  I will be rolling a Panda Monk as will so many other people, remember what it was like when DK’s were added to the game and you saw them EVERYWHERE?

Today’s posting is about another potential crafting choice that Pandas/Monks may make as they level up.  Jewelcrafting.  I put this on my list because there will be toons who want JC as a profession for either the crafting bonus for their raiding or because they know that JC is a huge gold maker.  It may even be their 2^nd or 3^rd JC profession.  Why you ask?  Because getting all of the recipes is a slow process that takes months of dailies to unlock.  So while one toon can net you a new recipe every 3-4 days, 2 toons can double this, 3 toons triple it etc.

I would not go crazy on this stuff but I would strongly consider it as a profit potential.  I did not include many of the items needed because they are slow movers or they are too JC dependant, meaning they really have minimal to no use for other professions.  I prefer items that are needed in multiple professions since that could drive demand and keep supply on the short side.

Here are my items for my shopping list to stockpile for MoP, items are based on the wow-professions guide for Jewelcrafting, which is an awesome resource.

100 Copper Bar

120 Bronze Bar = 60 Copper Bar, 60 Tin Bar

140 Mithril Bar

40 Adamantite Powder (200 Adamantite Ore)

10 Adamantite Bar

 70 from any of the following gems: Bloodstone, Chalcedony, Dark Jade, Huge Citrine, Shadow Crystal, Sun Crystal. Make sure to buy at least 5 Bloodstone, because you will need the Bloodstones when you reach 395.

46 Eternal Earth OR 23 Eternal Earth and 23 Eternal Shadow

5 Titanium Bar

 45 from any of the following gems: Carnelian, Alicite, Jasper, Zephyrite. I did not include Hessonite and Nightstone in the list, because you will use them later on.

16 Hessonite

40 Nightstone

30 Shadowspirit Diamonds and a lot more Uncommon Gems for the Fire Prism transmutes.

I will probably invest about 60k into these items overall, a little lighter than some of my other profession stockpiling that I am doing but enough to get me in the game and make some gold.  As always, consider your gold stockpile and how much you are willing to risk and be smart!

Stockpiling for MoP Part 4

Mists of Pandaria is right around the corner, and if you are like me then you want to stockpile some materials in hopes of making some big profits.  Today we look at enchanting materials.  The reason I am considering this a solid investment is similar to my post yesterday in regards to Leatherworking; Pandas!

We know that lots of people are going to roll a Panda and then pick either a Monk or another class to level up.  That also means they will need to pick professions.  Some will pick enchanting, either because they need an enchanter, they know it can be profitable or they want the profession bonuses for raiding.  So how can we profit?  Know what they need to level and have it ready to sell when they need it!

As usual, I went to wow-professions to get my shopping list.  There are a lot more items needed than what I have listed here, but these are what I am investing in because of the high quantities need to level the profession.  High quantities means high demand, tie that with a bunch of new enchanters who are trying to level their profession quickly means we could see prices that could triple or more.  In fact, most of these items are selling really cheap right now so you have the chance to stockpile at prices that could net you as much as 10x your investment.

The items I have listed are the quantities needed to level 1 enchanter:

134 x Strange Dust          

120 x Soul Dust 
155 x Vision Dust
230 x Dream Dust            
340 x Arcane Dust           
274 x Infinite Dust
550 x Hypnotic Dust
83 x Greater Celestial Essence
50 Volatile Earth
 
My strategy is to buy these items at low prices and hold them until the market is low in supply and then reap the rewards!  Invest what you are comfortable with and at the amounts you feel you can handle and remember that this is a strategic guess which means we may not see the returns we want or project, but if you buy at good prices you will at least double your gold over time.

Good luck!

Stockpiling for MoP Part 3

Today we will focus in on a potential market for us Auctioneers once MoP drops in a few weeks, leather!  I mean, who doesn’t like leather?  I buy it for my wife all the time, but that’s a different story!

Why leather? Theory: Once MoP drops we will see a new class, Monk.  They are leather armor specialists.  So the theory goes that a lot of these may in fact become Leatherworkers.  Some of these will also take up Skinning, but I am betting many will not want to bother with it because they want to level their toon fast and by taking up skinning it will slow them down. 

Does my theory hold water?  Time will tell but I am willing to take the gamble for 2 reasons.  First, if it is correct then we will see huge markups in leather as supply runs dry, something I love to see.  Second, if it does not happen I will stay make good gold from it by flipping it at the right times, it will just take longer to make my pile o’gold.

Timing is everything.  Right now on my server, I am seeing leather for cheap prices due to all the alts running around and people dumping inventory.  So when supply is high and demand is low what happens?  That’s right!  Prices drop and we gold goblins grab all of the supply we can afford!

So my list, ok, it is not “my list” but rather a list provided to us from a leatherworking guide over at: http://www.wow-professions.com/wowguides/wow-leatherworking-guide.html

Here are the items needed to quickly level Leatherworking from 1-525:

- 57 Ruined Leather Scraps

- 15 Medium Hide

- 260 Light Leather

- 160 Medium Leather

- 20 Heavy Hide

- 195 Heavy Leather

- 410 Thick Leather

- 410 Rugged Leather

- 100 Knothide Leather Scraps

- 307 Knothide Leather

- 28 Fel Scales

- 320 Borean Leather

- 50 Savage Leather Scraps

- 375 Savage Leather

- 168 Heavy Savage Leather (840 Savage Leather)

- 68 Volatile Fire

- 8 Volatile Air

- 28 Volatile Water

- 32 Volatile Earth

All of this is just for 1 person wanting to level Leatherworking.  Some of the items of note are; Medium Leather, Thick Leather, Rugged Leather, Knothide Leather, Borean Leather and Savage Leather.  Prices on these could easily triple during the first few months of the expansion. 

My strategy is simple; I am stockpiling the equivalent of enough leather to level 20 toons from 1-525.  So take all these item counts and multiply it by 20.  I figure that it is going to cost me about 6k gold per toon to level from 1-525 in just leather goods bought at the current cheap prices.  So that is about 120k gold investment, or roughly 7% of my gold stock.  If I am right about prices and timing then this could potentially bring me back 500k in leather alone!  If I am wrong then I will still make 120k profit but it will probably take me 6 months instead of 2, either way I win!

What is your plan?