Phase 3: Profit !

Wait... there's another warrior who writes about gold?

There is a story I have heard more than once. In various versions of this story, Pete Townshend has been replaced with Duane Allman, Roger Waters, and any of the members of the Rolling Stones (including Charlie Watts, which doesn’t even make sense because he’s the drummer). Doubts of truthfulness thereby acknowledged, the story goes like this: Pete Townshend, the great guitarist for The Who, and Eric Clapton, arguably the greatest Rock n’ Roll guitarist ever, go to a club together in London in the mid-1960s to see some music. They wander into the club, and up on stage is none other than Jimi Hendrix. He’s American, at that point unknown, and absolutely amazing. After a few minutes watching Hendrix play, Clapton supposedly turns to Townshend and says, “Well, we’re all just playing for second place now.”

This is the story I thought of a week or so ago as I was browsing Markco’s great site, justmytwocopper.blogspot.com. I’m sure that anyone who has found P3P has also already discovered JMTC. JMTC is voluminous, thorough, and has new content every single day. The JMTC forums contain a staggering volume of crowd-sourced knowledge. And now Markco has teamed up to do two new podcasts, one specifically about making gold.

I was listening to his podcast, A Call to Auction (that’s the last Markco link, I swear), while I was browsing the JMTC forums, and I had that Markco-as-Hendrix-”We’re all just playing for second place” realization. Zekta and I have not written often. Zekta has explained his reasons; for me, Markco is a consistent reason that I don’t have anything to say. To put it simply, when I get an idea for a post, usually Markco has already written about it. The most recent example, I was going to write about the demise of the Saronite Shuffle in Jewelcrafting (because of the drop in Infinite Dust prices), and then talk about selling the prospected gems raw, uncut, specifically Chalcedony. I’ve been using this strategy since 3.1 (selling to saronite shufflers was very lucrative, fyi), and on my recent home AH the conditions for it were just perfect. I saw a rise in Chalcedony and Dark Jade prices (3g-7g each) and a bottoming out of Saronite Ore prices (I bought 1000 stacks at 12g/stack). “Yes!” I thought, “this is time for a post. I sell in stacks of 5 and 10, I post about 3-4 bunches on the AH at a time for 48 hours, and I sell out almost every stack. This is P3P Post material!” Why didn’t I post that article? What, you ask, happened? Markco happened. (Okay, so that other link wasn’t the last Markco link.)

I’d like to be clear: I’m not complaining about this. Rather, I’m saying that right now, Markco’s the juggernaut, and that he’s earned it. He writes and publishes more content than anyone else. He does it better. He does it more accurately. As a reader of blogs, I personally find it interesting that Markco  seems to have outlasted even the mighty goblin Gevlon. I always thought Gevlon and goblins would be the premiere gold blog, but Markco has worked harder and created a community. (Gevlon, it should be said, seems to have gotten bored with writing gold posts, and he doesn’t seem to do anything he doesn’t want to do.) When Gevlon publicly burned Markco, I actually said that it was Markco who came out worse for wear. Well, time has proven me wrong. Markco makes products that work, and Gevlon, well… he does what he wants I guess. I dunno- the whole idea of Goblinism is revolutionary, and that’s all Gevlon and his approach- it litererally changed the way I play and think about the game. However, if I want to know how to turn 100g into 1,000g or even 10,000g, I’m going to JMTC.

That’s just my two cents about just my two copper. (See what I did there? I tried to be witty, but now I’m not sure that it worked?) My blogroll dies a slow death every day- someone else stops writing. Even hitthecap and my beloved Tanklikeagirl have stopped writing recently. If it’s the dreaded blogfade or just a break I’m not sure. But Markco, he just keeps chugging along, telling you to buy frozen orb, sell titanium bars, cut resilience gems ahead of an arena season. He does it better than anyone else, and at this point, the rest of us gold bloggers are all playing for second place.

GL! /salute