Saturday, April 9, 2011

Cross-Faction Trade: Flipping the Darkmoon Cards

  This is my entry for Cold's Gold Blogging Carnival on the topic "What are your favorite items to transfer to the other faction for sales?" I should say that this post is one of the reasons that I started this blog. I wanted to share my idea but didn't have a place to do it.

  I am going to tell you about my latest idea for cross-faction flipping. Attention: it is highly risky and can cause you big losses! But we all know that the more money we get the more risk we are willing to take. At least it is true about me.

   The idea
  I am talking here about single Darkmoon cards that are used to create Darkmoon decks. The main idea is to compare what cards are available on each side and at what prices. There can be two possibilities for you to make money:
  1. A particular card is missing on one side and is available comparatively cheap on the other side.
  2. A card is selling cheap on one side and is going for a much higher price on the other side.

  How to do it
  The most convenient way to compare what is available on each side is to use The Undermine Journal. It has a "Darkmoon News" page in the "Enhancements" tab. If you open such page for Alliance and Horde, you can easily see and compare all the information.


  Let's look at the example. This is the data on Volcanic cards for the Alliance side (first table) and Horde side (second table).

  What opportunities for flipping do we see here?

1. Two cards are not available on Horde AH at all (Two and Three of Embers) and are selling for a normal price on Alliance side.

2. There is only one Four of Embers on the Horde side, going for 1000g, but there are 9 of them on the Alliance side, the cheapest available for 550g.

  Tip: if you see that there is just one particular card available for medium-low price, you can try to buy and resell it for a high price on the same side.

  Another tip: if you end up with almost the full set of cards, assuming that you buy them all for medium-low prices, you can consider getting the missing cards and making a deck yourself.


Do not try this if:
  1. You don't want to invest large amount of gold in a highly risky enterprise.

  2. You don't know the Darkmoon card market well enough to assess the situation. 
  Many factors are important here:
  - faction ratio on your server
  - is the Darkmoon card market declining or not yet
  - how many scribes are involved in making decks
  - when will be the next Darkmoon faire and how it influences the market

  3. You do not have an opportunity to transfer cards cross-faction quickly. Two accounts work the best for this.

   My experience
  I am keeping records of all the cards that I buy, including the information on what side I buy and sell, dates, prices and profit after AH cut. For the last week I bought 27 cards for a total of 13k gold. I managed to sell only 10 of them for the total of 19.5k. So my enterprise is already profitable and I still have 17 cards to sell or make decks. According to my records profit from each card varies from 500g to 2300g. 
  And yes, I know that this week the Darkmoon faire was running and this may not work so well when it is over. I will keep doing such flipping and will see how it goes in between the faires.

  Please, let me know what you think of my idea. Have you tried it? What amount of gold are you willing to invest in a new risky enterprise?

1 comment:

  1. The server I run on is hugely horde populated... so Decks were cheap... i have 2 accounts and bought a sandstone drake to more baby toons around on the second account... Hit level 2 or 3 just riding from the starting area bybrill to BB... heh... anyway prices crashed horde side, and I was able to move a FEW deck on ally side, but it was painfully slow.. and still sitting on 2 of the 10 decks.

    It was hugely to my benifit... I moved the decks at about 60%+ over the horde side moving rates... I was not flipping though. Early in Cata I went hot and heavy into the DM Deck business... I had 40 decks and gambled badly that they would sell out on the AH before the next fair... I would walk into an empty market and win... I WAS WRONG!!!! they never sold out and watch my expected earnings go from .8-1M income to about cost recovery of 350K.... it was fun.. buy yeah... risk averse stay away..

    ... I also move a Vial of the sands and it was a great sell 55K... sadly i am at present playing horde and have more gold on the alliance side... :-/

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