Businessman's trinkets

When I read Matticus's article on WowInsider, I realized that I completely forgot one field of crafted gear: trinkets.

While crafted trinkets are available to jewelcrafters, alchemists and engineers, now we are talking about BoE items, that you can get without profession limits, for your money. These are the Darkmoon Cards.

To get a Darkmoon trinket, you have to collect 8 cards, the Ace, the 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 cards. They are BoE and float in the AH somewhere between 300 and 800G. Once you obtained all, you can combine them, forming a deck. They are still BoE and can be traded for somewhere around 5000G. The deck begins a quest, what can be turned in the Darkmoon Faire to get the trinket.

There are several Darkmoon trinkets, but only 4+1 are good enough on 80, the rest are cheap and can be bought for a few golds for your alt.

• Darkmoon Card: Death is a DPS trinket, providing 85 haste rating and having a chance on hit to cast shadow bolts (average 60 DPS bonus). You shall seek "Undeath" cards for it.
  
• Darkmoon Card: Greatness is a base stat trinket. There are 4 versions, giving 90 agility, intellect, strength or spirit. Has a chance to give a buff of 300 more of your highest stat, for 15 secs providing 100 of it on average. You shall seek "Nobles" cards for it.
• Darkmoon Card: Illusion is a caster/healer trinket it provides 100 spellpower and 1200 mana on use (5 min CD). Seek "Prisms" cards for it.
• Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon is a strange trinket. It gives 2% chance on spellcast to provide full spirit based mana regen for 15 secs. If you have 1000 spirit and intellect (healer druids and priests are around this), your spirit based mana regen is 1160Mp5. While casting, with talent, you get only 30% of it. So if this trinket procs, it gives you the other 70% for 15 secs, around 2500 mana. A druid casting 40/min gains 163MP5 in average, a priest with 20/min the half of it. So I'm thinking about getting this trinket. It's lvl 60, so must be cheap. You need to buy "Beasts" cards for it.
• Darkmoon Cards: Twisting Nether is another strange lvl 60 item. It gives you 10% chance to be able to resurrect. While usually it's not much, can have its uses on fights where death is probable and unavoidable (Theron Gorefiend for example, don't know if there will be bosses like him in WotLK). You need to find "Portals" cards for it.

So if you are rich, you can just buy any of them. I have not tried, but strongly assume that you can have 2 different Darkmoon trinkets.

Now here comes business! An inscribe can craft these! There is a spell to create a random lvl 80 card. The tricky material is Snowfall Ink. You need to mill Northrend herbs to get Icy Pigment. I've noticed that the droprate is highly dependent on herbs milled. If you mill high level herbs, like Icethorn, Lichbloom or Adder's tongue, you have much better droprate than from Deadnettle, Goldclover, Talandra's Rose or Tiger's Lily. I got better than 50% drop. Now let's see the prices:

• 6 Snowfall ink = 12 Icy Pigment = 12*9 Icethorn = 350G
• 3 Eternal life = 150G
• 3 Ink of the Sea, Resilient Parchment = 15G

So we got our brand new card for 500G and if it sells well, it sells for 800-900. As byproduct we gain around 30 more Ink of the Sea, that we can sell for like 150G.

What if you are not a scribe? The tricky part is the endless milling, and it needs only slvl 325, so a low level alt can be leveled to do the milling. Once you have the pigments, you can seek a scribe to make the inks and the card for a tip.