Friday, August 21, 2009

How does inscription work

Glyphs can be mass produced with high markup and low costs. The cost to list them in the AH is nothing. When you mill a stack of herbs you get 2 different types of ink from it. One ink (Ink of the Sea) goes into the glyphs or can be converted 10 at a time into that other ink (Snowfall Ink). The other ink is used to make darkmoon decks.

Lets get some numbers to work with:
20x[Adder's Tongue] => 1x[Snowfall Ink] + 6x[Ink of the Sea]
10x[Ink of the Sea] => 1x[Snowfall Ink]

Here is the math behind [Snowfall Ink]. If the cost of your snowfall is too close to your adder's cost then you can alreay make a profit by milling. I am going to scale up the example to make the math simpler.

200x[Adder's Tongue] =>10x[Snowfall Ink] + 60x[Ink of the Sea]

We can convert that 60 ink of the sea into 6 more snowfall ink. If 10 stacks of adders costs less then 16 snowfall ink, you could make a fair amount of gold just buying/milling/inking. That's one way JC makes gold. Buying/prospecting/crafting/DEing everything for a profit.

Lest move on to glyphs. Ink of the Sea can be exchanged for any ink needed to make a glyph. The most your glyph will ever cost is 2x[Ink of the Sea] + .50 silver parchment.

(20x[Adder's Tongue] - 1x[Snowfall Ink] ) / 6 = cost of 1x[Ink of the Sea]

You can see that Ink of the sea can be produced for dirt cheap. Most of the cost is the time spent milling it. If you move to a large scale, make sure you have the market for that much snowfall. The larger numbers I produced, the harder it was for me to unload snowfall and the price keeps falling.

Someone making 100 glyphs a day only has to sell one stack of snowfall a day. Someone making 300-400 a day has to sell 3-4 stacks a day.

That brings us to Darkmoon Cards.

I don't like to deal with them but here is what I know. When making darkmoon cards you have a random chance to make one of 4 types of cards that can be numbred from ace to eight. I did say random. The math says that on average for every 32 cards you make, you should have enough cards to make 4 decks. You will have lots of duplicates but should have enough of the cards of the type you need for a deck, but you may have to do some trading.

6x[Snowfall Ink] + 3x[Eternal Life] + 3x[Ink of the Sea] => 1x[Random Darkmoon Card]
192x[Snowfall Ink] + 96x[Eternal Life] + 96x[Ink of the Sea] => 32x[Random Darkmoon Card] => 4x[Different Darkmoon Decks]

You may do the math and figure out that making cards with the extra snowfall is better then selling it. If you have no market for snowfalls, this is your only option to unload them

Cards and Glyphs work well together. They use different parts of the same plant. If you don't want to get into the other market, try to team up with someone that does work it.

5 comments:

  1. I don't like to work with cards either atm the raw material cost is around 200G and all cards that aren't from nobles are below 200g so bleh I really don't like the fact that blizz made one deck have uber several cards and other decks have less interesting cards D: although I think inscription would otherwise definitly be so much more powerful when all decks would be going for 5k..

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  2. I use the following formula for calculating whether Snowfall Ink is better sold in cards then for a low AH/trade price (using a 5% AH-cut-buffer):

    ( ( ND + UD + CD + PD ) * 0.95 - ( 96 * EL + 96 * IotS + 4) ) / 192

    (ND=Nobles Deck/DMC: Greatness, UD=Undeath Deck/DMC: Death, CD=Chaos Deck/DMC: Berserker!, PD=Prisms Deck/DMC: Illusion, EL=Eternal Life, IotS=Ink of the Sea)

    I always assume I can trade the doubles I get for other cards I need, or sell them and buy the others for the same value (or even cheaper) hence I assume a 100% chance for 4 decks per 32 cards in my calculation, since this is now always true I attempt to use the worst possible values for items when calculating it and for my server this formula would result into:


    ( ( 4500 + 1000 + 250 + 250 ) * 0.95 - ( 96 * 18 + 96 * 3 + 4) ) / 192
    = 19g per [Snowfall Ink], if I would take the exact current AH values this would be above 22g. Without considering the Inks of the Sea I would get from a stack of herbs I would already make a profit.

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  3. Thanks for that calulation. It also pointed out a mistake I made in my math that I already corrected.

    That is a nice simple way to put it.

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  4. kev, your initial calc for dark moon cards says 5 snowfall inks. it's 6. when you multiplied it out you properly took it to 32*6=192.

    semantics, sorry, but i'd hate for someone thinking of switching to the dark moon market to have their calcs all off thinking they can make decks for 5 inks.

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  5. If the snowfall ink price is higher then your AH price you make gold or do you make gold if the snowfall ink price is lower then AH?

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