WoW Confidential

The Darkmoon Faire is in town for the first time since the launch of Cataclysm and I took the opportunity to level from 485 inscription to max and have my hand at making gold with Cataclysm Darkmoon Cards.

Back in WOTLK I made a lot of gold by crafting darkmoon cards; the old Greatness, Illusion and Berserker cards and even then I was late to the party, I started crafting them after they were available for a year but I pulled in about 6,000g profit in one day crafting them. I found that crafting darkmoon cards were highly profitable after reading Markco’s 20k gold guide, he’s updated it with Cataclysm gold strategies I highly recommend it.

Last night after I dinged 525 inscription I put together a darkmoon card profitability spreadsheet and got to buying up materials and crafting cards, here’s how it turned out.

Figuring Out Profitability and Costs of Darkmoon Cards

Step one was to figure out my costs to craft each card and the value of the finished decks. You can check out my darkmoon card spreadsheet to see all the values but here’s the summary of my costs:

10x Inferno Ink

After leveling inscription I only had 6 inferno inks left over and I value my inferno inks at 200g per.

Out of a stack of a lower end Cata herb you can expect 5 blackfallow ink and 0.5 inferno inks, I sell my glyphs for a minimum of 65g each which gives me a value of 21.66g per blackfallow ink, if I get half an inferno ink also from that stack of herbs I would divide by 2 the value of inferno inks (200g) and add that to the value of the inks giving me = 21.66g x 5 inks from a stack + 100g for the 0.5 inferno ink = 208.3g. This means that I can pay up to 208g for a stack of lower end herb and be at cost, luckily I sell a lot of glyphs above my 65g threshold and you’ll see from my calculations later that I make a profit from the 200g value on the inferno inks.

30x Volatile Life

Paid on average 10g per Volatile life, costing me 300g per card. It would of been much cheaper if I had stocked up the previous week before the faire.

1x Resilient Parchment

Total cost to craft a card = 200g x 10 + 300g + 0.5g = 2300.50g

The next step is to find out the value of all the Darkmoon Cards to see what our average profit will be per card.

In Cataclysm there are 4 new decks

Hurricane Deck – Combine Ace to Eight of the Winds – turn in for Darkmoon Card Hurricane (AGI or STR)

Tsunami Deck – Combine Ace to Eight of Waves – turn in for Darkmoon Card: Tsunami

Volcanic Deck – Combine Ace to Eight of Embers – turn in for Darkmoon Card: Volcano

Earthquake Deck – Combine Ace to Eight of Stones – turn in for Darkmoon Card: Earthquake

The way I designed my spreadsheet is to take the value of the completed deck and then divide that number by 8 (since you need 8 cards to make a deck and you have equal chance to get each card)

Since each deck has its own value you must average out the value across each card since you have an equal chance to get a card in any of the decks.

For Example: Darkmoon Card: Hurricane goes for 25,000g on my server, dividing that by 8 gives us a value of 3,125g for each card. On the other hand Darkmoon Card: Earthquake sells for 10,000g making each card worth 1,250g.

It is important to know the value of each of the different cards so you can set up snatch lists to buy hurricane cards (of the winds) for under 3,000g  or post them for sale if you see certain ones over that value.

Here are the values of the cards and the average on my server:

So the average of all those cards gives me 3,312g. I can expect over the long term making each card to eventually even out to that amount per card. Since I know my cost is 2,323g that means on average I should pull in a profit of 3,312g – 2,323g = 989g per card.

Making 12,000g In One Night of Darkmoon Card Crafting

I got to work crafting cards, seeing that I could make on average about 1,000g for every card I could craft.

I went ahead and bought up all the herbs I could for under 10g each (or under 14g each of the higher end herbs that give 1 inferno ink per stack), bought up volatile lifes under 12g and any inferno inks that were under 175g.

I made a total of 13 cards and these were the ones I ended up with:

Ace of the Winds – valued at 3,125g

Four of the Winds – 3,125g

Seven of the Winds – 3,125g

Ace of Waves – 5,750g

Four of Waves – 5,750g

Eight of Waves – 5,750g

Three of Embers x 2 – 6,250g total

Four of Embers – 3,125g

Six of Embers – 3,125g

Seven of Stones x 3 – 3,750g total

Total value from cards = 42,875g. Total Cost = 30,199g. Profit = 12,676g

I know the gold isn’t sitting in my mailbox yet, but it is safe to assume that I can get these prices for the cards as when the darkmoon faire leaves so will the supply of these cards as long as I sell them before the next darkmoon faire.

Not bad for 2 hours of work, there is another step to take though if you really want to make a big profit.

Buying and Selling Darkmoon Cards for Profit

Crafting the cards is just one side of the battle, if you know how the whole thing works you can spot which cards are in low supply and ones that are underpriced, this is more of a long term strategy but will pay off nicely as you finish off completed decks.

With the darkmoon card spreadsheet you know how much each card should be worth, if you make shopping lists in auctionator (see image below) or a snatch list for each card you can do a search each time you log on and buy up cards that are going for less than 20% of the value or sell off extra cards you have that are above 20%.

For example, I was only able to craft 13 cards and had 3 “of the waves” cards to make the Tsunami Deck, when I ran my shopping list search on all of the “of the waves” it showed that the Two of Waves and the Three of Waves were selling for 4,499g and 4,199g respectively. Since the value of the cards are 5,750g (since the Tsunami Deck sells for 46,000g on my server) I bought them up and right there made 2,802g profit there. They are cards I need to go towards making the Tsunami deck and I’ll keep my eye open for the Five/Six and Seven that I still need, I’ll even be able to use the profit difference to pay more for the cards I still need if I have to since I’ll still pull in a great profit if I can complete the deck.

It’s all about having the bigger picture in mind and reacting to the market needs, buy the cards that seem to be flooded at the moment in the market that you require and sell off cards that seem to be in really high demand or none are listed, charging a premium so that those who are desperate to finish off decks may be willing to pay 50% or double for a card to just get it now!

Good luck with your darkmoon card profits, I do recommend caution in stocking up on too many cards as the price will tapper off with each darkmoon faire (remember the price of Darkmoon Card: Greatness went down to about 4,000g average near the end of WOTLK) but there are large profits to be made if you keep track of your costs. Also be sure to check out Markco’s 20k gold guide for other tips like the one in this article.