Darkmoon Decks in the Shadowlands (Patreon)

As in every expansion the Darkmoon deck Trinket from Inscription remains one of the best entry level gearing options as far as BoEs goes. This usually makes them sell like crazy early on, and Shadowlands is no difference.

Darkmoon card basics

Darkmoon Card Trinkets are some of the most involved crafting in the game, and this time around Blizzard added another layer of RNG with blank cards.

When you craft a darkmoon card, you get a random one out of 32 different cards, split across 4 suits of eight cards each. As such the RNG is pretty high, and you need to craft a large volume of cards to get enough for a deck (check out this post for some in-depth math). 

Blank cards

Blank cards are a new addition. When you craft a card you have a chance to proc an extra blank card. These can then be turned into a finished card from a specific deck for 1 tranquil Ink. This will help reduce the crafting cost slightly as you can craft the card for just one tranquil, rather than 1 tranquil and 7 each of the Luminous and Umbral Inks. With the milling rates I've seen this boils down to about 30 less Death Blossom for that card (which is 2100 gold on my realm).

This is a sizeable crafting cost decrease, but it does not change the number of wasted cards significantly.

Getting the recipe

The recipe for Darkmoon Cards in Shadowlands is learned from your profession trainer. You need to get to skill level 80. Luckily this is fairly simple, as you can get most of the way just by crafting inks and mass milling herbs. I had to craft 6 missives and 6 Writs of grave robbing, and everything else was herbs and mass milling. I prioritized Death Blossoms so I would get an even ration of Luminous and Umbral Pigments.

I'm not going to write out how many herbs you need, as you will need thousands of Death Blossom and hundreds of Nightshade to craft enough cards that your average crafting cost is decent.

Day 1 results

This is a notorious day one market, but it is usually also very profitable on a longer timeline. I have personally already made 740k in sales, and I have another 300k on the way. This will fund essentially all the herbs I bought and I still have some decks left over. So as long as I can sell them I will be making a profit, even if I am unlikely to get incredibly rich from this endeavour.

I expect herb prices to fall and make this more attainable as the trinkets are currently on the expensive side.

Crafting

There are no real tricks here. You just have to mill herbs, craft inks and craft the cards. As I covered in my math post you will have to craft hundreds of cards, so unless you have the capital to go hard you should stay away from this market. You will need about 10 Death Blossoms per Nightshade to get the right ratio of pigments so you don't end up with anything left over. Nightshade is the only reliable source of Tranquil Pigment, so stick to that one.

Pigment yields

Based on my milling so far you can see the results in the table below. This is fairly robust for everything, except the rate of tranquil pigments from Death Blossom, which still could be wildly wrong. The rest of the data is close enough to be reliable. I think it's likely the rate of pigments for Nightshade is about 25% for each pigment type, whereas the rate is likely 15% for umbrals and luminous and 0.5% for tranquil from Death Blossom.

Selling the trinkets

Currently the market value of herbs will still be in flux. I am selling them using the base AH UI and trade chat. You need to know your crafting cost, which on average will be roughly equal to 34 Death Blossoms and 3.3 Nightshades. You can simply calculate your cost dynamically in a spreadsheet based on what you purchase the herbs at. This does not account for blank cards, but that would lead to a lower crafting cost, so this errs on the side of pricing things too expensively. 

If you are on a high pop server you will likely be swimming in competition, but I find I can get a decent chunk of sales. Relisting often and using trade is key to make sure you get the sale. A lower profit margin, but a guaranteed sale is often better than a higher potential profit margin that never materialises.

Good luck and happy hunting!