Making gold with Inscription: Battle for Azeroth Darkmoon Decks

Darkmoon Decks has been the hottest and most talked about market in BfA so far. Profits have been high and the market can still be worth getting into.

My early results

As you can see from my latest gold cap challenge update I have been selling a decent number of decks. I am currently in profit, and while I expect the price to fall, I still expect a decent profit margin will remain as players jump on the next flavor of the month bandwagon. A lot of the bandwagoners will inevitably forget about the decks.

Mailbox of World of Warcraft Sales

Some players will say the market is dying, but the effort required to make decks means that eventually the masses will find other markets to focus on, and profits will be on a good, but not crazy level. Unless blizzard nerfs the trinket into oblivion for some reason.

TSM4 Ledger summary showing Darkmoon Deck Sales

How does it work?

Darkmoon cards have been a staple of inscription for a long while.

You craft a darkmoon card and it will randomly turn into one out of 32 possible cards organised in 4 decks of 8 cards. If you have all the 8 cards in one deck you can turn them into a deck. The full deck is a powerful item level 350 trinket.

The item level and equip effects make them very useful and highly sought after.

The RNG of card crafting

Due to the random nature of the card crafting process you need to craft a very large number of cards to be certain you get a decent number of completed decks.

The 4 decks have very different prices as dps decks are way more popular than the tank deck for obvious reasons. As I outlined in my post on the RNG you should craft at least 1000 cards if you want to enter the market.

You don’t have to do this all at once though. Personally I expect to craft cards for a long time.

The prerequisites

You need to level inscription to skill level 100 to get access to the rank 2 version of the recipe. The rank 3 version is obtained from the Tortollan Seekers at revered, and should obviously be a goal once you hit 120.

In addition to this you will need some way of mass producing Expulsom. The best way is either going to be Leatherworking or Tailoring uncommon bracers. Both are learned at skill level 1 and you cna quickly switch between professions depending on what is cheapest.

Scrapper and the Easy Scrap Addon

You then scrap the bracers at the scrapper for some mats in return and a 15% chance of getting one expulsom.

To speed up your scrapping I suggest getting the [url=https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/easy-scrap]addon easy scrap[/url]. It makes it very simple to scrap your items effectively.

Crafting Costs

The recipe requires 10 Viridescent inks and one expulsom. You can get the Viridescent ink three different ways.

You can buy the finished inks, buy Pigments to turn into inks or buy herbs to mill and then turn the pigments into inks. Typically it will be most profitable to buy your own herbs, but it does cost a lot of time. If you buy the inks or the pigments, your crafting costs are very easy to find. It’s just 10 times your price of pigments or inks per card.

Milling your own

Bilisonyxias milling data indicates that you need about 8 herbs per Viridescent or 3 anchor weeds. I round the herbs up to 10 herbs per viridescent to get a very simple idea of the crafting cost.

Together with a 10 card per deck long run average this means that an upper limit crafting cost per deck is roughly equal to the price of 1 000 normal BfA herbs plus the cost of ten Expulsom. It’s also extremely easy to calculate.

I suggest also rounding the price of expulsom up to something so you can quickly keep the total cost of decks in your head. I use 500 gold for expulsom which is actually more expensive than my current cost.

If your maximum herb price is 50 gold that would give you a rough estimate crafting cost of 55 000 gold including Expulsom.

Selling them

The darkmoon decks are expensive and the market is quite saturated at the moment. Selling in /2 is an absolute necessity and will yield you more sales. This is also why you want to have a simple sum for the crafting cost so you don’t have to think about whether a deal is good or not.

I’ve sold 4 out of 6 decks so far through /2.

I also suggest using a decent bid percent undercut to entice players who want to bid to save money to do so. I use 12 hours as the posting time in TSM as undercutting is very frequent.

Cancel scans are absolutely worth it, and are very quick as there are only 4 different items.

TSM settings

Herb prices are very different between realms, and they have not yet converged. As such I suggest using hard coded gold limits to figure out your crafting costs. I just added some more profit calculations to my spreadsheet for Darkmoon Decks, so you can easily find a rough estimate of the crafting cost.

The new rightmost column named Crafting Cost 10 Cards milling is based on the simplification of 1000 times the average herb cost. I suggest using a number larger than this as your minimum crafting cost.

Darkmoon Decks auctioning operation in TSM

My current settings are in my pastebin. I strongly suggest checking the minimum price and adapting it to your realm based on the spreadsheet.

If you want to level up your gold making consider supporting my Patreon, and you will get all my TSM settings as I make them! 

11 thoughts on “Making gold with Inscription: Battle for Azeroth Darkmoon Decks

  1. Haha I was expecting this one.

    Firstly: just a point out on your post. The link to the addon on curse is bad formated (not sure how to say this in english).

    Now, about the Inscription… unfortunatelly I’m already JC/Alchemy (I do believe it will compensate later on) on the realm I’m playing now and I only have one character at 110 there. I was thinking to quick level a DH to 110 and just use him for Inscription/Expulsom (and later on level him to 120 to farm rep) but I’m having little time to play due to new work shift haha =(

    Anyway I’m leaving for work right now but I gonna try to buy the cards and make a deck to see if I can get some profit without the need of Inscription. If I sell it for the price I undercut just now it would be a ~15k profit.

    Wish me luck and any advice is more than welcomed

    Love your content

  2. I thought of getting inscription at the start of the expansion, but chose to keep Alchemy and Enchanting. I can see now those won’t be making any gold. I did drop enchanting for herbalism. I have stockpiled around 1500 herbs. Would it be useful to drop Herbalism for Inscription to make cards and use my alchemy to transmute Expulsom? I can make 5 of them a day.

    1. I think you are giving up on enchanting and alchemy premutarely. None of them have really started yet as they only begin matterimg when raids open.

      The expulsom transmute will not be enough to feed inscription, as you will need to craft 100+ cards to get your first deck. I’d keep my herbs and get rank 3 alchemy recipes to be ready for Uldir in 1.5 weeks.

      1. I thought more of selling individual cards. Cause I could make 5 cards a day for around 5k and they sell for a lot more than that.

        I’m sorry, I’m panicking right now. I see people going on about the gold they made, one guy in trade this morning said he made 14 mil with Blacksmithing. I’m sitting here with barely any gold, my professions aren’t worth anything and they weren’t through all of legion.The only way I made gold was obliterating scrolls, and now my 13 years of WoW comes down to this last month. From past experience it’s hard for me to have hope that these 2 professions will make anything, considering by the time raids open people will have a surplus of materials to dump, and potions to sell since they had to mass craft them to level the profession.

        1. Don’t get too discouraged by other players.

          Individual cards is a bit of a gamble as fathoms cards are much more valuable than the others.

          Leveling alchemy will take about 60-80 potions, that’s just enough for two raid nights for dedicated raiders. I’ve personally been buying battle potions heavily.

          In Legion most herb prices and potion prices doubled when Emerald Nightmare opened. I expect we will see a very similar change in BfA.

          I’m going to think about this overnight and see if I come up with some more specific advice.

          1. if that happens then I would be making a profit. A small one per flask, but theoretically so many would sell it would be good.

            On the bright side I made 2 vial of the sands before 8.0, and decided to hold them cause they were only selling for 10k profit. Just remembered about them today and they are at a 90k profit now.

    1. You may be able to shuffle tidespray linen into cheap enchanting materials through the bracers. Enchanting is also quite profitable on a lot of realms, so you can look into the ring and weapon enchants.

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