Making gold with Card of Omens

Card of Omens are cards that can be crafted and then “flipped” by using them. The flipped card will be one of several blood cards with values ranging from 1 copper to 6000 gold. Large sample sizes of flips indicates that the value from flipping and vendoring the cards is most likely somewhere above 4,5g per card. The redditor Schrobbert made the definitive post on this back in June. As we can see from the reddit post the method is profitable when herb prices are 1g or below. His assumptions are a bit conservative as well as he just calculates 2 pigments per mill, which is quite a bit below the correct 2.3725

I compiled the current median prices on WoD herbs for both EU and NA in the table below.

Herb

US-price

EU-Price

Starflower

 0.71  0.88

Frostweed

 1.07  1.14

Nagrand Arrowbloom

 0.82  0.82

Fireweed

 0.74 0.97

Talador Orchid

 0.74  0.9

Gorgrond Flytrap

 1.16  1.24

As we can see with current prices this is gonna be profitable across the board in both regions. As noted on reddit however you need to move a very large amount of herbs into Cards for this to be worth it.

Requirements

The requirements are very simple. You learn the recipe from using the Draenor Inscription scroll. This can be bought from the Inscription trainer in your factions Ashran base. It requires level 1 inscription, so there is zero prerequisite for the craft. The biggest requirement for doing Card of Omens is to get enough herbs. You need to flip 20 000 cards at least to feel reasonably certain that your yield is around the average.

The process

The general process for crafting Card of Omens is quite simple. One stack of 10 cards costs 5 War Paints (The WoD Inscription daily CD) and 10 Light Parchment. You can see the process outlined below.

  1. Buy herbs: Just buy all WoD herbs you can find below 1g each
  2. Trade Herbs for Primal Spirits
  3. Mill herbs: No comment needed
  4. Craft War Paints with your daily CD
  5. Craft Work orders
  6. Primal Craft all your pigment into War Paints
  7. Craft Cards
  8. Flip Cards
  9. Vendor Cards

The first 5 points should be quite straight forward, with the Exception of #2. To trade herbs into Primal Spirits you need access to a level 3 Garrison. In your Town hall there will be a rotating NPC. Some of these NPCs are the traders. Specifically for this we want the herb trader. At this trader you can exchange 5 of any WoD herb for one Primal Spirit. With Primal Spirits you can craft War Paints with the Spirit of War recipe, This turns 4 pigments and one Primal Spirit into 2 War Paints. Doing this you can craft War Paints without being limited by the daily cool down, and actually reach the number of cards you need to craft.

So let’s do some math on the crafting cost per card in terms of herbs. We know 2.3725 herbs is equal to 1 pigment. The cost of 1 War Paint when primal crafting is 2 pigments and half a Primal Spirit. War Paints are therefore valued at 7,245 Herbs. We can then divide this by 2 to get the herb cost per card which is 3.6225. With the value of a card being 4.5g or higher with herbs at 1 gold you are making on average one gold per flipped card. As we see from the quoted prices this just gets better with cheaper herbs.

Mass crafting – issues and tips

This method is not for people who are not into clicking buttons. It requires a very large number of crafts. As we can tell from the reddit thread you need to flip at minimum 20 000 cards, preferably 5 times that amount. This equates to 3.6 times that many herbs. You also need to patiently wait around for the herb trader so you can turn your herbs into Primal Spirits.

I strongly suggest flipping the cards with a second account if you have that. You can use AutoHotKey (You can find a script for WoW here) to send keypresses from your main and just keybind all the buttons on your flipping account to a simple /use Card of omens macro. Or you can flip on both accounts while doing something else. After flipping the cards you just sell them all to a vendor.

You should not reflip the cards that can be flipped again as this is always negative value.

Garrisons

As we can see from the process you can also make war paints from the daily cooldown and work orders. This is more efficient than primal crafting. The cards can be crafted by the NPC in the inscription hut in a garrison even if you don’t have inscription. This means that the Scribe’s quarters is a very nice building to have in all of your garrisons as it will provide some very simple extra profit.

Profit margins on these will be even better as a war paint only takes 2 pigments, which means each card will cost 1.25 herbs less. This puts you at 100% profit margin at 1g per herb. It also means that you can tolerate smaller sample sizes.

Concluding remarks

I only really endorse mass crafting Card of Omens for people who enjoy crafting very large amounts of items, the rest of you should stick to the daily cool downs and work orders on any relevant alts you have hanging around. I have personally done some decent samples using a ton of herbs I bought around Legion launch and I find the process decently soothing. That being said your mileage might very well vary.

The gold is fairly easy and guaranteed and can be easily combined with watching a TV-show or similar. Given that it is a vendor shuffle the only real risk is not crafting enough cards, and you can control that.

8 thoughts on “Making gold with Card of Omens

  1. You can also get your Primal Spirits by trading ores to the ore trader, dust to the dust trader, fur to the fur trader, or leather to the leather trader. They all sell a Primal Spirit for 5 of the raw mats, so you can buy whatever’s cheapest (as long as it’s under 1g, and sometimes various Draenor mats are far below 1g) and trade it to that trader when available. Then you can use your herbs for milling into pigments.

    1. Yeah, this is a great way to get primal spirits. Dust and herbs in particular are often cheap, but finding the trader can be a hassle, so you have to be ready to trade a lot when you do find the right one!

      1. I find the best way to store the mats is to mail them to an alt. Each mail holds 12 stacks of 200. It costs a few silver to send it and it holds for 30 days. I send these mails to an alt who doesn’t do any AH activity so I never have another need to open the mail on that alt and it’s convenient to leave the mails unopened in the mailbox. If I forget to log onto that alt it’s no problem because the mails bounce back after 30 days and I can download them on my main and resend them. When the right trader shows up in the garrison of my main, I go into my alt’s mail and hit RETURN on each mail, I don’t even have to worry about bag space.

        Right now I’m sitting on tens of thousands of primals and my main goal is getting enough cheap herbs to mill the pigments. Fortunately there is a seller on my server who posts several thousand of each Draenor herb every couple days at my price point (which is incidentally well below 1g). I can’t fathom how this is worthwhile for that seller, but as long as s/he keeps doing it I’m golden. If the ultra-cheap herbs dry up it will still be profitable (just slower) to buy herbs at 1g.

        When I notice have a trader in any of my garrisons, I make a custom group and list it, so other players can visit my garrison and use the trader. This used to be more common even a year ago in the earlier days of BfA, but it’s very unusual for anyone to bother now. I still hang out in my garrisons a lot so I just do AH stuff there while I leave the group open until it delists for inactivity. Mostly server hoppers join, but I do get a few players who join and use my trader and they are very grateful.

        Hopefully others will get the motivation to start sharing their garrison traders again and it will make it easier on everyone who is still doing this old-school gold farm. Since the vast majority of Card of Omens crafters are opening the cards themselves, not trying to sell them on the AH, competition isn’t a factor and there’s no risk to one’s own profit by helping others.

        1. SOunds like you have this market down pat!

          I would be surprised if we ever see garrison trader groups really make a come back, but it could happen if the methods get highly publicized again.

  2. Would someone be so kind and recommend an addon which can track the gold value i get from these card vendor sales?
    I dig thru some guides, but noone mentions anything.

    Should i really just use pen+paper, before/after method?

  3. whats the difference in profit between this and trading the herb for savageblood/bloody gold purses

    1. Trading herbs for Bloody Gold Purses = an average profit of 40s per herb. If Schrobbert’s breakeven point is 1g 20s per herb that means you’re making about 3 times as much money doing this as you would doing the purse shuffle.

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