Inscription in wrath gives us one of the most consistent high-end goldmaking methods the game has seen, with darkmoon trinkets and cards.
The Pre-raid BiS rush
This will by far be the most relevant for the initial gearing rush, as players hit 80 and want to gear up. This is going to be an incredible boom and bust marked. The trinkets are good, but most relevant when players are not fully geared yet.
How do they work
When you craft a Darkmoon Card of the North you get a random card from one of the decks, there’s 32 total cards and each of them have an equal chance. I did the math on this a while back, and you will have to craft hundreds of cards to get a relatively low crafting cost, as you will end up with wasted cards.
Once you have all the cards in a deck you can right-click any of them and they will combine into the finished deck, which is an item that begins a quest. You can turn the quest in at the Darkmoon Faire, when it is in town, to get the finished deck.
The first faire
As you can only get the actual trinkets during the Darkmoon Faire, the most important timing will be to have a bunch of decks to turn into trinkets when the first faire rolls into town. The trinkets you get then will have to tide you over until the next faire. During the faire week you can also expect to sell of single cards as players collect their own decks. Then once the faire is gone decks and cards will probably sell much slower, while the trinket supply slowly runs out.
Trade cards to bring down costs
This is a market where going hard can give you tremendous advantage. Take advantage of the social aspect of the game by trading cards with other scribes and finding farmers to buy from. In the last week before a faire you may want to start buying single cards you are particularly low on so you have a lot of decks ready to go.
Getting the recipe
The recipe can be trained from any inscription profession trained, and simply requires you to have leveled inscription to level 400. You should be able to get to 375 in the pre-patch, so make sure you are prepped and ready go. You do not need to be above level 65 on the character you choose to do this on, as you don’t need to go into northrend to get any recipes.
Materials bonanza
The materials needed for the decks will likely be a huge bottle neck early on. In particular, the three eternal lifes needed will be a limiting factor. You also need a ton of herbs, particularly the later zone herbs that have an increased chance of yielding icy pigments.
For each card you will need a total of 60 of the higher level herbs: Adder’s Tongue, Icethorn and Lichbloom. A full deck will on average require 600 herbs to craft it, assuming you don’t trade cards.
You will need to have a substantial war chest to get started here, as it will be expensive, and if you can’t craft 100ish cards you are unlikely to even get a full set of decks.