Uncommon Inks from Inscription

Dear Gold Queen …

From: A

Subject: green inks

Message Body:
I just read your post about making gold from glyphs, one of my 2 main toons is a scribe so I’ve jumped on this lol. I was just wondering what do you do with the “uncommon” quality pigments that drop occaisionally from milling?

Thanks =)

Hi A, thanks for dropping me a line.  How are you doing with making glyphs? I think they’re great, I make a killing on glyphs every day!

“Green” or uncommon inks have always worried me too, I’ve never been 100% sure what to do with them.  The inks are:

• Hunter’s Ink
• Dawnstar Ink
• Royal Ink
• Firey Ink
• Ink of the Sky
• Darkflame Ink
• Snowfall Ink
• Inferno Ink

Inferno Ink, naturally, is currently a high worth ink. Darkmoon Card of Destruction takes 10 Inferno Ink, 30 Volatile Life, 1 Resilient Parchment.  When you craft a Darkmoon Card of Destruction you have a chance of making any of the ‘Cataclysm Darkmoon Faire Cards’.  You can read more about these under my Darkmoon Faire guide.

The other inks are more tricky.  You have the choice of:

1. Vendor the Ink
2. Auction the Ink
3. Use the Ink to craft a Darkmoon Faire card

Our problems here are:  Will the ink sell at auction house?  Is it worth auctioning?  You can find this out by doing a trial auction, or by checking AH over several days and watching the movements of the ink.

What card will I get?  Will it sell?

I’m afraid the card is random, you could get any of the following cards:

• Hunters Ink – Rogues Deck
• Dawnstar Ink – Swords Deck
• Royal Ink – Mages Deck
• Firey Ink – Demons Deck
• Ink of the Sky – Random Darkmoon Card – one of the vanilla / original World of Warcraft Darkmoon Faire cards.
• Darkflame Ink + 3 Primal life = Greater Darkmoon Card – one of the ‘Burning Crusade’ Darkmoon Faire cards.
• Snowfall Ink + Eternal Life = Darkmoon Card of the North – one of the ‘wrath of the lich king’ Darkmoon Faire cards.

Compare the auction prices of the ink against the rough average price of a card from the deck it makes, and then decide whether to craft the card or not, depending on your time availability and whether you can generally be bothered or have better things to do!

If you decide to make the cards, you then have to decide whether to

1. Sell the cards singly?
2. Save and make them into a deck?

Darkmoon Faire Tsunami card

Its a simple case of maths – add up the cost of the cards as singles, and compare it to the cost of a deck.  Which will sell for most gold?  Don’t forget to check whether or not there is a market for the item.  Will it actually sell? Do players on your server want single cards, or decks?

There is another factor in this equation which is time of the month: is it Darkmoon Faire time?  Card prices are cyclical.  They increase during a Darkmoon Faire, and drop during the other days.  So, are you wanting a profit now, or a larger profit later?

I’m going to end this study with a quick run down of what I am personally doing on my own server. Remember, there is no point copying what I do, unless you’re on my server.  In which case I’ll pwn you in the AH anyway. I’m mean like that 😉

If I have a lot of time to spare, I’ll make the inks into cards.

If I have recently seen someone buying decks from AH, or yelling in trade that they want the Insane achievement, I will contact them and offer them the decks direct.

Otherwise, I’ll auction the inks off and let someone else deal with them. Let them make the gold from the card and deck making, because I like to concentrate on glyphs.

I hope this helped, and please let come back to me and let me know how it goes for you on your server

About the Author

The Gold Queen is written by Alyzande. With many level 100s, 9 years expertise in making gold, 10 garrisons, 16k achievements, 1505 days played, and over 18m gold earned. The Gold Queen blog teaches you how to make gold playing World of Warcraft using ethical trading, auction house flipping, crafting, reselling snatch lists, and farming gold making.