He did a profit calculation based on purely buying herbs at 75s each, and turning those into War Paints to craft the Card of Omens.
So, take a look at his original post. Then, read my reply:
There’s the initial quest from the herb trader that gives 25 Primal
Spirits for a total of 50 herbs. So the
cost per Spirit there is 1.5g each.
More relevant is that Primal Spirits after the initial quest cost 5
herbs each (not 25). So 3.75g per Primal Spirit. As they mentioned, since one is doing this in
mass, that’s really the number to go by, since the quest can only be done once
per 5 days.
10 herbs = 4 pigment: 7.5g
5 herbs = 1 Primal Spirit: 3.75g
15 herbs = 2 War Paints: 11.25g (1 War Paints: 5.625g)
5 War Paints (28.125g) + 10 Light Parchment (.03g) = 10 Card of Omens for
28.155g
So 1 Card of Omens costs 2.82g
For their sample, they averaged 6.56g per card. That’s a profit of 3.74g per card.
So that’s pretty good! But I’d
argue that one needs to evaluate how to best profit from Primal Spirits.
Let’s say you had 15,000 herbs.
Plan A:
Turn 15,000 herbs into 2,000 War Paints (Total cumulative cost: 11,250g)
Make 400 sets of 10 Card of Omens, a total of 4000 Cards (Total
cumulative cost: 11,256g)
Use the cards, average card has a vendor value of 6.56g. Total Vendor
value of cards is 26,240g,
Profit of 14,984g.
Plan B:
Turn 15,000 herbs into 2,000 War Paints (Total cumulative cost: 11,250g)
Make 400 sets of 10 Card of Omens, a total of 4000 Cards (Total
cumulative cost: 11,256g)
Sell the cards on the AH for 8g (very conservative). Total AH sales:
30,400 (32,000g – 5% AH cut)
Profit of 19,144g, even better but there are complicating issues (see
notes below)
Plan C:
Turn 15,000 herbs into 120 Savage Bloods (5 herbs per Spirit, 25 Spirit
per Blood) (Total cumulative cost: 11,250g)
Sell 120 Savage Bloods on the AH @ 150g each: 17,100 (18,000 – 5% AH
cut, assuming they sell the first time listed, and deposit is refunded).
Profit of 5,850g. So not as
good. :(
Plan D:
Turn 15,000 herbs into 2,000 War Paints (Total cumulative cost: 11,250g)
Turn 2,000 War Paints into 28.57 Ensorcelled Tarots (Total cumulative
cost: 84,104g (8,571 for Water, 64,283 for Blood))
Sell 28.57 Ensorcelled Tarots for 4,986g each, for a total of 135,328g
(142,450g – 5% AH cut)
Profit of 51,224g!
Plan D looks pretty good, but…there’s a catch.
Or rather, a few of them. Plan C
requires purchasing or using Sorcerous Water and Savage Blood, and there may be
more profitable uses for them. And even
if there isn’t, you’d have to allocate the some of the profit towards the Water
and Blood. If you do it based on their
cost, you’d only allocate 13.4% of the profit to the War Paints, which is
6,852g.
And obviously, you can’t craft or sell fractional items, but this is
just a theoretical example.
The other issue is the sample size.
I’m not a statistician, so I’m not sure how many cards you’d have to
produce to have 90 or 95% confidence in the average vendor sell price.
As far as Plan B goes, that’s a LOT of cards to sell. TradeSkillMaster is showing the average sales volume at 10 per day at best (per server). Maybe
you could sell them in lots in trade chat, who knows. But listing on the AH, you’d constantly be
eating deposit costs, reducing your profit.
As an aside, if you’re trying to transfer gold to another server, and
are hitting up against the ridiculous gold limits for transferring a character these cards are another way to get around that cap (there are other ways however). Just keep in mind that unlike the resulting cards from Mysterious Fortune Cards, cards created by using a Card of Omens are soulbound.
All in all, I’d say they've found a pretty good money making plan. Personally, I have about 1500 War Paints
sitting on an alt, and I think I’m going to be making myself some cards.
