The 100K Mark and Other Thoughts

A few days ago I passed my first 100K gold threshold. It happened unceremoniously after a couple of particularly good days of sales. In one day I sold stuff in excess of 15K. Of course, not all of that was profit. Now I'm around 110K and growing.

A while back I was blogging about reaching the gold cap. In my younger WoW days I would have never imagined that acquiring 214K gold was possible in one's lifetime. Now, I'm no longer impressed by these huge amounts. 100K is just a psychological barrier and I'm already halfway to the gold cap. This proves that it's not that hard to make gold in WoW if even a relative noob can do it. Well, I used to be a noob, I would like to think that I've gotten better at gold making though I'm far from being a master.

One of my recent strategies that made me a lot of gold is Darkmoon Cards. The latest Darkmoon Faire was very profitable. I had 3 Nobles Decks that I changed into Darkmoon Card: Greatness at the Faire. I didn't sell them immediately but waited for the Faire to end and then I put then up on the AH, along with some other trinkets that I had converted from lesser decks. Because I had prepared for this beforehand, I made a huge profit due to low crafting costs. I was missing a few cards but I bought them during the Faire from the AH at low, competitive prices.

Another strategy that almost backfired was flipping Tankards O'Terror. These dropped from Coren Direbrew during Brewfest. Now this was a very risky endeavor and that's why I didn't mention it as a gold-making strategy back at the time. This weapon is excellent for Dual-Wielding Death Knights, Combat Rogues and especially Enhancement Shamans. The beauty of it is that it's a ilvl 226 weapon with very good damage and stats. On top of it all, it's BoE!! Along with other people, I figured that it might be profitable to buy these during Brewfest and then wait a few weeks after and sell them for 200-300% profit. Oh well, things didn't quite work out that way.

During Brewfest I managed to snag 22 of these for prices between 550 and 800 from the AH. The 800 ones were right at the beginning when I didn't think they would drop lower than that. Of course, a few days later you could find them often at 700 gold and below. So I picked all the Tankards at or below 700 that I could find. People who did this hoped to flip them later at 2000 gold or over.

The problem was that many people had the same idea so what happened, as it always happens in these situations, is that after Direbrew there were still too many Tankards on the AH, keeping the price low. Eventually I decided to just cut my losses and sell all the ones I had at the current market price. I sold a couple at 1300 gold but the rest I'm still selling for prices between 800-900 gold. It's not much but it's still a profit. So far I've sold about half of them at almost 3000 gold profit.

It might be that the price for these will go up sometime in the future but I don't want to risk it what with patch 3.3 introducing even more powerful items. At any rate, I'm not looking at a loss but at a tidy profit, even if I sell the remaining tankards at 800 gold.

In conclusion, I can say that I have learned a lesson of sorts. This is the first time I've attempted to flip epics on such a large scale and this business is notorious for being extremely unstable. A word of caution: if you want to try this, be sure to think things through and consider future market trends and what future patches might bring. And make sure you have plenty of funds and a lot of patience.