This Was An Email To a Friend

He's trying to get a Darkmoon trinket. Poor guy asked what DMF stands for.

DMF stands for Darkmoon Fair. The fair has to be going on for you to actually be able to get the trinket. Otherwise, you just have the deck. Prices can go up or down depending on whether or not the DMF is going, or how soon it will start/end.
*WARNING THIS TURNED INTO A WALL OF TEXT RUN WHILE YOU STILL CAN*

Here’s the breakdown for how many herbs you need to make 8 cards. The thing with these decks is that when the scribe makes the card, you get a totally random one each time. The deck you’re after uses serpents cards, ace through eight. If you look at the AH, the deck is just called Serpents Deck, and the trinket you can get from the deck is called Relic of Yu’lon. Additionally, the individual cards can be found by searching for “of serpents.”

Anyway, the last time I milled herbs for 2 cards, I had exactly 400 herbs. When you mill a stack of herbs you get two different pigments. One is a common pigment (Ink of Dreams) and the other is uncommon (Starlight Ink.) You need 20 of the green pigments to make the 10 Starlight inks the card requires. The thing is you can trade 10 Ink of dreams for 1 Starlight Ink. A full deck worth of Darkmoon cards takes 80 Starlight Ink and 24 Ink of Dreams. Or just 824 Ink of dreams if you’re using the ink trader vendor.

You get *about* 10 Starlight Ink and 70-ish Ink of Dreams per 200 herbs.

Bento’s request for 1000 herbs is about right because that should make 85 Starlight Inks. Warning…math inc. From that 1000 you get roughly 350 Ink of Dreams and 50 Starlight Ink. Enough for 8.5 cards.

Skip to the bottom for the punch line.

These are actual prices from the Kael’Thas Alliance AH:

Starlight InkX10 (102g per)
Ink of DreamsX3 (8g per)
Per card= 10 SI+3 IoD= 102X10+8X3= 1044g per card just from ink.

Fool’s cap=90g per stack

The raw cost of making 8 cards, just buying stuff from the AH is as follows:
Only buying herbs:
-Potentially 4500g

Only buying inks:
-8352g (buying 80 SI/24IoD)
-7900 (buying 50 SI/350 IoD) This is the AH value of your 1000 fool’s cap, by the way.
-6592g (buying 824 IoD)

Relic of Yu’lon (67500g per)
Serpent Deck (45500g per)

Aw, you skipped my math.

SO, (LOL TOO MUCH INFO) you have a few options here. The most cost effective way of doing this is just farming your own herbs and having Bento mill them. It’s much more expensive to buy the inks from the AH, so don’t do it unless you have to. If you have the means, I would probably just buy 1000 herbs from the AH, assuming you can get them for around 90g/stack or less. If Bento says he can get you a complete deck for 1000 herbs, that’s a pretty damn good deal, considering how each time you make a card you have a 1 in 36 chance of getting what you want. Even though you’re spending 4500g for those herbs, you’re getting a trinket worth 10x that much. If you have the money, just buy the herbs as they come up. Don’t spend over 90g per 20 and you’ll stay within that figure.

Technically you could buy 1000 herbs, have somebody mill them and make them into inks, sell the inks on the AH, then buy ANOTHER 1000 herbs to make your cards and you’d (by the numbers above) only be out of pocket 1100g total for a 67500g trinket. This is heavily dependent on there being a LOT of fool’s cap on you AH, which there is not.

After November’s Darkmoon Fair, prices for individual cards and trinkets should come down. Your server is selling decks and completed trinkets for a lot more money than mine. Demand won’t sustain prices like that. Still, the cheapest way of getting the deck will be farming yourself. 1000 herbs represents hours of farming though, so if you have the money, just buy them.

It’s been a slow morning.