A while ago I started to work toward getting an [Darkmoon Card: Greatness]. It is by far the best trinket available for death knight DPS and, if you can spare some defensive stats, is pretty good for tanking as well (threat and parry). There are actually four types of this card and they are earned by completing Darkmoon Nobles Deck, which itself requires you to collect the nobles cards 2 through 8 and the ace. The cards themselves are created by inscriptors via Darkmoon Card of the North, but the created card is random so it can be any of the numbers and of any of the four new decks introduced in Wrath. Oh yeah, fun with expensive mats and the random number generator to come.
The Darkmoon Faire cards needed to get the trinket are very expensive on the auction house. A full deck will easily cost you 8,000 gold or more, depending on the market on your realm. Because of the various trinkets offered as rewards it is a best in slot item for most classes. To make things worst the other deck cards, which can be randomly created, are of very little value to PvE raiders which only increases the value of the noble cards.
I decided to take a longer but cheaper approach to getting my trinket. Instead of buying the cards I had them made. This still required a significant investment for the raw materials and finding an inscriptor or two who didn’t mind spamming their buttons.
The details may vary based on your realm’s market, but I ended up buying just [Adder's Tongue] to get the ink made. That ends up making way more [Ink of the Sea] than you need and not nearly enough [Snowfall Ink]. Luckily in patch 3.0.8 Blizzard added the ability to trade in ten Ink of the Sea for one Snowfall Ink. So I would buy up 42 stacks (840) of Adder’s Tongue and that would give me enough ink for 8-10 cards total. I did that twice, got lucky with the cards created, and got most of my cards.
I ended up with six of the eight cards needed, bought the seventh at a really low price and then bought the last card at normal price. Including the cost of all the mats and the cards I had to buy I spent over 5,200 gold. Now the trick to making this cheaper than buying just the cards is selling off the left over cards you don’t want. As I said most of the other decks aren’t popular so the cards range anything from 10 to 300 gold in value. If you get a duplicate nobles card, however, that’s a big bonus. I’m not quite done selling my cards but so far I’ve made up half of the gold I spent. That number won’t increase by any large amounts at this point, so the trinket still cost me 2,600 gold easily, but that is a far cry from the 12,000 gold the full deck usually goes for on my realm.
If gold is a problem for you then the trinket isn’t worth it, but if you have some coin to invest in gear and you are willing to wait the month or two it takes to get everything together and visit the Darkmoon Faire then it is possible for a reasonable amount. I wouldn’t recommend card making for profit, there is just too much random chance and a big up front investment.
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