Lessons from the 30 days to a token challenge

Last week I did some analysis of my 30 days to a token challenge. Today I will sum up some of the lessons and five a brief outline of how I would do the challenge if I was to repeat it. 

Major lessons

1. You will have to do at least some farming, at least at my activity level. This famring should be done early to maximize the gold you have working on the AH
2. Crafting can work well
3. Material flipping works, but is HEAVILY limited by capital
4. Material shuffles are amazing
5. 2×4 farming is the best farming method (unless you go gathering professions

Get raw gold/farm early

The number one thing that held me back early was honestly doing too much longer term focused stuff like leveling professions and doing emissaries. I should have spent my time farming early on in the challenge and then speed leveled crafting later. It may even be better to just farm, then flip materials and then do that until your first token before you start investing in crafting professions. My capital limited me for the majority of the challenge. 

Crafting is profitable, but requires a lot of capital

Crafting was overall quite succesful for me even if I got burned on a lot of items with the release date announcement in the last week. I should have waited with crafting until I could level my profession to the right level in one fell swoop however, and I did spend too much gold on enchanting recipes I knew would never make it back. In general I locked too much capital in crafting professions early on when I should probably have just been flipping material. On the other side the enchanting tool of the trade and the enchanting shuffle wast the number one method that worked for me by a large margin, so it is possible that I made the right call. 

Material flipping is great, but start low

The first gold you have is so precious that you absolutely have to prioritize it really well. Do material flipping, but look for deals below 60% dbmarket first. You can sell these for 80%dbmarket which means you get your gold back WAY faster, and you’re still getting a great profit margin. Eventually you can afford to invest at 80 and flip to 100%, but you do need to have at least 40k gold available for that to make sense. 

2×4 farming is great to get capital

2×4 farming is great as it does not require any setup, generates loads of materials that will sell quickly and has no barriers to entry. It can also be combined with crafting professions as it does not require you to have any gathering professions. If I did the challenge again i would do more 2×4 early on to generate a surplus and then possibly go into crafting later on.