WoW Trading Card Game Ceasing - Time To Take A Gamble?

Just over a week ago, Blizzard announced that they would be ceasing support for the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game amidst much disappointment & some surprise. Along with the cessation of the physical cards, Blizzard will no longer be running official tournaments although there are many player-run tournaments so those will probably continue for a while yet.

When they released the amazing Timewalkers - Reign of Fire box set at the end of July, there was quite a bit of excitement over it. The Timewalkers - Reign of Fire box set is pretty unique as it includes all the previous loot cards - pets, mounts & novelty items that were specific to previous expansion sets. They also increased the drop rates so players had a much better chance of getting their hands on some of these rare loot cards including the Feldrake, Big Battle Bear and Spectral Tigers.

So why am I, an in game gold maker telling you about all this? Well, I've made some good gold from selling a few of the rare mounts - I sold a Spectral Tiger for over 500,000 gold last year & I'm currently selling an Amani Dragonhawk. The loot card pets also sell well but those I tend to buy to use as giveaways here on the blog - I recently gave away Bloat the Bubblefish and have a few more pets stocked up for future giveaways.

With the cessation of the TCG, many of these pets & mounts will probably see price increases, either on ebay, Amazon or in game as supply is highly likely to dry up. With the imminent release of Hearthstone though, there is some speculation as to whether these rare mounts & pets will turn up in that game. We know that Blizzard have other pets & mounts in the shop but there is always the possibility that the TCG ones may turn up there too!

Personally, I'm going to snap up any TCG pets I see on the Auction House that are underpriced - with the reality of Connected Realms looming ever closer after patch 5.4, I think my Auction House will likely explode into activity & I want to be ready to sell to my new customers! It really helps that all these pets are classed as rare in game & most have really good pet battle abilities - I know Rez of Eviscerated Gaming Podcast loves his Vicious Grell for example!

These are the pets I'm going to be looking for!

• Bananas 

• Dragon Kite

• Eye of the Legion

• Purple Puffer Fish 

• Ethereal Soul Trader 

• Hippogryph Hatchling

• Gregarious Grell 

• Landro's Lichling

• Landro's Lil' XT

• Rocket Chicken

• Spectral Tiger Cub

• Nightsaber Cub

• Sand Scarab

• Tuskarr Kite

I'm also considering buying one of the Timewalkers - Reign of Fire boxes - it is a bit of a gamble to be sure but with demand so high right now, I just need to get one decent pet or mount card out of the box & I'll have made my money back. When I look at the price of the mounts in particular, it's really hard not to take the gamble - I just have to decide if I can afford to take the chance. If I don't get a good one then at least I'll have a nice addition to my in-game collection of pets or mounts!

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Win a Purple Puffer Fish! Giveaway Time Again

You've heard of Christmas in July and as my blog birthday is around Christmas time, I thought I'd have 2 Christmasses this year! Yup, I actually spent some real life cash & bought a TCG card to give away to one lucky reader.

I chose Bloat the Bubblefish card which gives a Purple Puffer Fish when it's redeemed because I love the big puppy eyes on real life Puffer Fish! I'll be honest though - I have no idea if it's a good battle pet or not but one of the Amazon reviews says "Very powerful aquatic pet, good to battle with elemental pets" so hopefully it is a good one! It travels behind you in it's own bubble so that's an added cute thing!

So what do you have to do to enter this draw? Just sign up for my mailing list - it's that big box over there on the right. I can hear you asking "Why should I sign up, Nev?"

• Never miss a post because your RSS feed reader messes up or you don't have easy access to the internet
• It's also one way of getting around internet content filters at work - each post I write here gets sent to the email address you subscribe with & most work based internet access doesn't block access to emails.
• Additional content specifically for subscribers - content that doesn't make it to the main blog but that you might find useful or interesting or both. There's a free 3 part mini guide already set up & waiting for you as soon as you sign up too.
• Subscribers only giveaways like this one - I plan on doing more of these as my finances allow it
• Breaking news - if something time-sensitive to gold making hits, I'll occasionally send out an email blast - that's just a fancy way of saying I can email everyone all at once with the news.

So there you go - nice & easy to join in and see a bit of extra stuff from me. It's also easy to unsubscribe if you find you hate it but I hope you won't of course!

Closing date for entries will be 6am on Monday 12th August (UK time) - that means 1am East Coast US, midnight Sunday 11th in Central USA and 10pm West Coast US I think. For my European friends, that will be 7am or 8am on 12th (depending on which bit of EU of course!) and will be Monday evening for my Aussie & Kiwi friends. I'll number up all my subscribers & use the random number generator to pick a winner who will be contacted via email.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up now & get your chance to win a cute Purple Puffer Fish pet to add to your collection!

PS It's a permission based mailing system so you will receive a welcome email and an email asking you to confirm your subscription. You need to confirm to be entered for the draw ok? Good luck everyone :)

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Gahz'rooki - Battle Pet Gold Mine Maybe?

If you've been doing the Battlefield: Barrens & Darkspear Rebellion quests in patch 5.3 then you will probably be familiar with the weekly quest to earn your Radical Mojo and 200 Valor Points. Collecting various supplies also gives you access to Epic armor items with an ilevel of 489 - not the best but certainly very handy for any fresh 90's! You will need a Radical Mojo for each piece of armor though so it's not quite as easy as it might sound!

If you've got the armor you want and have a spare Radical Mojo, you can purchase a Gahz'rooki's Summoning Stone from Ravika, the Darkspear Rebellion Quartermaster located just outside Razor Hill. It's a rare quality battle pet in the form of a Hydra which in itself is great fun as I really like those little critters!

So why am I telling you about a cute battle pet on a gold making blog? Well, when patch 5.4 is released, that will be the end of the Battlefield: Barrens stuff & the Quartermaster will be removed from the game, creating a void in the availability of this pet. It has been confirmed on Twitter that Gahz'rooki will become a rare drop but we don't know yet just how rare he will become.

I've been watching the price on this pet drop recently as more & more players complete their Battlefield: Barrens stuff & just throw this spare pet onto the Auction House. Prices on my 2 main servers are less than 500 gold now and sometimes as low as 250 gold. I think it's definitely worth a small investment to stock up on a few of these now - they aren't one of the best battle pets but for collectors of rare pets, it will always be attractive.

I'm not going to go crazy & fill my bank with them but I am going to snatch up any of the really cheap ones. It's a risk & a long term strategy - it's unlikely they will sell like hotcakes but as a small but steady flow of profit, it will be just another string to my bow.

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Making Gold With Pet Battles

If, by any chance you read my other blog, She Rides Dragons, you'll know I've become slightly addicted to pet battling! Well, ever the good goldmaker, I've been looking at how I can profit from this new addiction of mine and with a little help from my friend @Socowow on Twitter, I've been looking at prices across various servers that I've dabbled on in the past.

When I was heavily into WoW and playing all the hours of a day, I often started an alt on a different server, just to play the Auction House from a different angle. There are 2 servers where I have a few thousand gold so I popped onto the Undermine Journal, hoping to compare prices directly. Unfortunately, TUJ doesn't have a direct comparison facility for pets as it does for other parts of the Auction House so I had to spend a little more time on it.

On one of the other servers (let's call it A), I had 8000 gold just sitting there and its Alliance population is about 2.5 times bigger than my main server. Prices in their Auction House are generally lower than my own and that includes battle pets so I went on a bit of a shopping spree! I did decide not to buy any level 25 pets though - I'm still in the early stages of my pet addiction and enjoy leveling them so I thought I'd get 8 level 1 rare quality pets for the price of 1 or 2 level 25's.

My thought process was to buy good but cheap pets and just flip them onto my main server but there were so many I didn't have, I got slightly sidetracked and decided to keep them! I'm now down to about 1200 gold there so this morning, I went on another buying spree but not pets this time. No, this time I was looking for deals to flip to increase my gold so I can buy more pets!

The other server where I already had about 3000 gold is another low Alliance population server and their prices are even higher than my main server. There was a much greater variation in prices though - level 25 pets were selling for anything from 5000 to 15000 gold, so I will be keeping an eye on that Auction House and snapping up deals when I find them.

On server A, level 25 battle pets sell for between 2000 - 5000 gold which is very cheap compared to my own server where level 25's typically are listed at 10000 gold or higher. The potential for nice big profits is definitely there but until I start selling off level 25 pets, I don't know how good the sales will be. Having said that though, like any 'slow' market, it will sell, eventually and a 5000 gold profit is not to be sneezed at, even if it does take a couple of weeks to sell.

Another factor in my slow start in this market is my own noobishness - I only have one level 25 pet so far and I haven't even thought about the Pet Battle PvP stuff yet. I can only look at rare quality pets for now and hope they are good ones for dedicated pet battlers. Once I have a better idea of which types & breeds are best for high level PvP, then I'll have a much better idea of what to flip.

Have you tried this market yet? Any tips or tricks you'd like to offer? If so, leave a comment to help this sad addict out ok? lol

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20 Days of Gold Making - Day 17 Pets

And so my 20 Days of Gold Making continues today with Day 17 "Pets - did you used to do the vendor pet sales? How have pet battles changed things for you?".

I know there was a Vendor Pet route guide at one point - an efficient but still slightly time-consuming route to pop around all the various vendors that sold pets so you could buy them to list on the Auction House. It still amazes me every day just how lazy some players can be or unable to look things up on the internet to find out how to get things for themselves!

I did used to sell the Moths from the vendor in The Exodar and of course, the White Kitten from Lil Timmy, wandering the streets of Stormwind. There was also Dealer Rashaad in Netherstorm but I rarely went all the way out there unless I had an alt leveling through Outland. The Mana Wyrmling was about the only one that sold for any real profit anyway.

My main pet income came from the low level Engineering pets - the Mechanical Squirrel & the Pet Bombling. My Engineer isn't high enough level to get the Mechanical Yeti plans & the Mechanical Toad recipe is super rare so I only flipped those when they turned up cheap on the Auction House.

Pet battles have changed the whole pet market as far as I can tell. The Engineering pets I do have the recipes for don't sell now, the materials to make them don't sell either (unsurprising of course!) and as they are not 'rare' types, the demand is low.

What I have done a few times though is to go to one of my alternative servers where I have some gold & buy cheap pets there. I learn them then cage them on my banker alt so I can list them on my home server. I should imagine that there is a pretty good market here for anyone who plays regularly on more than one server & who knows which pets are in highest demand. It's also a great way of picking up pets cheaply to fill the gaps in your collectors list. Sometimes it pays to be a server hopping altoholic!

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Pet Battle Gold Making - Two New Possibilities?

Pet Battles - Fighting to Make Gold?

If you're playing WoW regularly at the moment then you know that Patch 5.1 hit the US servers yesterday & the EU servers earlier today. There's some interesting stuff in there - some class changes, a new PvP area in Krasarang Wilds with dailies too, some new scenarios, adjustments to various raids and of course, the new Brawler's Guild. But for me, the best bit of the whole patch notes list is the huge amount of changes to the Pet Battle stuff.

If you want to read through all of the patch notes, you can find them in various places but here is the WowInsider version. My favorite bits are below though:

Pet Battles

• A new item has been introduced that can be used to upgrade the quality of Battle Pets: Battle-stones.
• Battle-stones are available in two basic types, general purpose Battle-stones that can be used to upgrade the quality of any pet, and family specific Battle-stones, which can only be used to upgrade pets of a specific pet family.
• Battle-stones are available in two qualities: Flawless Battle-stones can upgrade pets directly to Rare quality, while Polished Battle-stones will upgrade a pet to Uncommon quality.
• Players will have a very small chance to obtain a general purpose and family specific Flawless Battle-stone after winning a match against wild pets; defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone. Family specific Flawless-Battlestones will be of the same family as the pets that were defeated. These valuable items are not soulbound, and can be sold on the Auction House.
• Family specific Flawless Battle-stones can be found in the Sack of Pet Supplies obtained from performing Pet Trainer quests, and are Bind on Pickup.
• General purpose Polished Battle-stones can be purchased for 1000 Justice Points.
• Players can now keep up to 650 pets.
• The Dragon Kite can now be used in Pet Battles.
• The Imperial Silkworm and Imperial Moth pets can now be created by Tailors.
• Two new Battle Pets now roam Darkmoon Island waiting to be caught.
• Pets can now be filtered by name, type, rarity and level, and filters will remain in place each time the Pet Journal is viewed.

The first thing I thought when I saw these notes was that it would be easier to find the pet I wanted in my journal - it's been a pain to find a specific pet until now & I only have 170 or so. I hate to think how frustrating it was for the really serious pet collectors! Then I re-read the battle-stone stuff - the battle stones you can win from a pet battle in the wild are not going to be soul-bound so that will be a new niche market to keep an eye on. If you already have a good team built up then perhaps using these battle-stones won't be quite so important to you & you can make some good gold on the Auction House with them.

It does say there's only a small chance to pick up battle-stones from a wild pet battle though - the other source is the Sack of Pet Supplies from Trainer quests & those will be Bind on Pickup - if you do decide to sell your battle-stone early on, price them high - with a possibly small supply, prices should be able to stay high for quite a while, at least until more people start pet-battling!

Secondly, there are 2 new pets for Tailors to make - the Imperial Silkworm & the Imperial Moth. Until now, crafted pets have not been very worthwhile in pet battles but with the introduction of battle-stones - might we see a renewed interest in the crafted pets? I'm sure many Engineers are hoping so - Engineering pets have traditionally been a good gold earner for Engineers (think lifelike mechanical toads especially) & I know several scribes who made fairly good gold from the Inscription pets.

The only thing we really need now is for the Auction House interface for Caged Pets & Companions to be 'fixed' somehow. At the moment, there is no way to see the prices of both versions of a pet except by searching them separately & that is a nuisance!

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Mists of Pandaria - Pet Battles - First Impressions & How To Make Gold

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If you follow me on Twitter (@nevahaddict), you may have seen me bemoaning the fact that I wasn't going to be able to play Mists of Pandaria until next week when I get home from my travels. Well, as luck & a chance comment on Twitter would have it, it turned out that I could so like many others, I have almost lost the last two days in this wonderful new world Blizzard have created for us!

I thoroughly enjoyed the whole start area for a few hours but I'm out of practise with questing so I decided to head back to Orgrimmar & take a look at these pet battles. That was my biggest mistake! Multiple achievements, 70 captured pets & 100 pet battles later, I realised that it was almost time for my friend to get home from work so I just logged out. I didn't even put any of my MoP herbs on the Auction House.

General Gold Stuff
That brings me to this morning - I did eventually get all my auctions posted - manually as I don't want to mess up any of my friends add-on settings. My sales have been atrocious on this US server, about the only stuff selling is the few cheap herbs I manage to snatch up now & then or the level 77-80 green armour. We have the same glyph problem that so many others are bemoaning - even today, most of the Monk glyphs are under 100 gold with just 3 or 4 above the 300 gold mark.

Pet Battle Stuff
I currently have a lvl 15 twink on the Alliance side of my main US server & a little banker over there too. I decided to check out the Auction House for pets - just to see what was happening. I found a very busy pet section on their auction house - over 600 various pets listed as opposed to the 100 or so on the Horde auction house. Prices were much lower too so I snatched up a few bargains - 3 x White Kittens for 100 gold each & a Razormaw Hatchling for 35 gold. I've also been picking up Elementium Geode pets for 200 gold or less over the last few months so my little banker alt learnt 3 geodes, the 3 kittens & the hatchling.

I then logged back to my main & made up a team to get some pets leveled. I only took them to level 4-5 (without even leaving Orgrimmar!) but I then caged them up & listed them on the Horde Auction House at a higher price than the level 1 versions. This is still a work in progress type situation - there have been problems with the Battle Pets section not being searchable on the remote Auction House App & I haven't seen much in the way of price movements, undercutting or even any sales yet. I have a feeling most people are either leveling to 90 or playing in the new Pandaren starter zone or perhaps, like me, they got into a time warp & are still pet battling out in the wilds somewhere!

There is also a small problem where a vendor bought pet (Companion Pet) goes into the Miscellaneous/Pets section whereas one that has been learnt then caged gets listed in the Battle Pets section. If you just list a vendor bought item, you may want to check prices in both sections before listing it - variances between the two prices can be quite noticeable even tho at level 1, the caged version is identical to the uncaged one.

Making Gold From Battle Pets
So how will I try to make gold off this new pet battle system - well, for starters, I'm an altoholic - I have alts dotted over multiple servers & most are just the bankers, left behind after I deleted the leveling toon on that server. So with pets being account wide, I'm going to be searching for cheap pets across about 8 different servers. I'll learn them & perhaps level them a bit (we'll see how that market develops over the next few weeks, I'm sure) & then cage them & sell them on the most expensive of my servers. Eventually I think the most valuable battle pets will be the highest level ones of course but for now, it's a whole new market to test & explore.

I also quite enjoy farming stuff so I will undoubtedly be out there, farming or grinding away at getting some of the rarer pets from drops like the various whelplings, firefly or even the disgusting oozeling. I'm sure my tactics will change as this market develops but for now, I'm just going to poodle along & enjoy all the new stuff that Mists of Pandaria is offerings us.

Do you have a tactic you are willing to share? What do you think of the Pet Battles so far? Let us know in the comments or you can email me (email address in right sidebar). I look forward to hearing from you.

Edited to add: Whilst I was looking for a picture for this post, Cold has just published his post for today Companion Pets vs Battle Pets - Pricing Discrepancies & Warnings - I've only touched on some of the points so go have a read there too for greater analysis of this whole subject! Great Minds think alike huh?