Phase 3: Profit !

Author’s note: Normally I wouldn’t post on the same day as Zekta, as I don’t like to overshadow his posts. However, because of the timing of the post, I think it will benefit the reader to have it today. With that said, I encourage everyone to go read and comment on Zekta’s post about a particular Dilemma. It’s a great post, and we want your feedback!

Most readers are probably familiar with the saronite shuffle. If not, here’s a short recap: the saronite shuffle is a plan explaining what to do with green/common quality gems after prospecting them from saronite ore. It was originally posted on the JMTC forums by the great Zamboni, who posted it in the form of a flow chart:

Zamboni's shuffle can make you some money

You use the chart as thus: if, for example, you prospect some ore and you get a Sun Crystal, you follow the charts and combine it with two Crystallized Earth to make a Sun Rock Ring. After that, you would send that ring to your enchanting/disenchanting toon, where it would be turned into enchanting mats (usually Infinite Dust, but sometimes Lesser Cosmic Essences or others). If, instead of getting a Sun Crystal you got a Chalcedony, you could use that to make a Crystal Chalcedony Necklace, or a Skyflare Diamond, or even sell them on the AH because, back then, Icy Prism creation required three Chalcedony instead of one, as it does since patch 3.3.3 dropped.

The key to the shuffle was two-fold. First, you need cheap Saronite Ore. But you also needed cheap Eternal Earth. In patches 3.0-3.2, Saronite was sold on most realms for 12g-13g per stack (sometimes as low as 9g per stack). Eternal earth was initially cheap (20g-30g per stack on my server) because people didn’t have any use for it; however, as the shuffle caught on, prices for earth pushed up and up. I was paying up to 60g/stack at one point, and stacks were regularly listed at 100g. This was tolerable because demand for Infinite Dust was very high; it regularly sold for 4g-5g per piece, making 70g-80g per stack a common price.

With the advent of patch 3.3 the shuffle fell apart. How did this happen? Zamboni explained the cause as a comment on this very post, so I’ll let him speak for himself: “The crash in dust prices started when the green gem jewelry jumped from 1-2 dust to 2-3 dust [per disenchant], which is a huge increase when you’re making a thousand of them at a time (2500 dust instead of 1500). Stoneguard Bands jumped from 2-5 to 4-7 dust to pour even more dust into the system. Increasing dust production by two-thirds for free saturated the market. And this was after Blizzard cut the material requirements in half for many Lich King enchants, so prices were already falling from their peak.”*

(*Edit: Zamboni’s comment is edited into the post and my incorrect information has been edited out, all for the sake of readability. I had thought it was the LFD tool, but Zamboni took the time in a comment to correct me. This is only part of his comment, and I encourage people to read the entire text, which can be found attached to this post. Thank you Zamboni.)

This huge increase in supply, coupled with the gradual maturation of players (ie: more people finished leveling enchanting, removing demand pressure from dust and placing it on abyss crystals and other endgame enchanting mats) spelled death for the shuffle. Prices for dust dropped to about 1g each (20g per stack), making it not worth doing for most serious AHers. Markco wrote a post a while back to demonstrate that you could still do the shuffle if you vendored the rings instead of disenchanting them, but basically the glory days of the shuffle are long gone.

And that remains true… for the most part. However, I think that the shuffle may be coming back. Not big-time, not like it was… but the saronite shuffle appears to be profitable again.

I stumbled upon this totally by accident- I was cleaning out my bank of enchanting mats and I put four stacks of Infinite Dust up for sale at 45g/stack. I wasn’t really paying attention, but thought, “this seems expensive, but maybe I’ll sell a stack or two, and it will be worth it.” The next day I was surprised that every stack sold. So, I took a look- dust was selling for 3.5g-5g per piece! That was 65g-100g per stack! I couldn’t believe it.

Why? I think there are a few causal reasons. First of all, nobody’s doing the shuffle anymore, so there is simply less dust out there. Second, because dust was so cheap, people started doing other things with their mats: maybe they’re enchanting gear for endgame or alts, maybe they’re leveling enchanting… I don’t know; all I know is that they’re not selling their dust. That further decreased the supply of dust. Finally, and I think this is the big reason- it was Wednesday.

The AH works in cycles. Markco has written a lot about this, but I’m sure that most people have observed it. It plays out differently for every profession. For example, a blacksmith may sell 50 or more Belt Buckles on Tuesday evening, then might sell 10 or less on Wednesday and Thursday… but usually on the weekend they don’t sell many at all.

Enchanting has a similar pattern, but on different days. Most players play on the weekends. Raiders play all week, but by sheer volume, there are many more people in 5 man dungeons on the weekends. This is the primary supply source for the Infinite Dust at this point. So, on the weekend, the price of dust drops down to 1g per piece (20g per stack or so). However, by the middle of the week, that cheap dust is gone. Prices push back up, peaking around 3g-5g a piece by Thursday. Friday the market starts to turn, and on Saturday the dust starts coming back in and the price goes down.

I took a look at my server prices recently. (That’s right, I too can do teh mathz! Zekta isn’t the only P3P blogger with a calculator, you know.) Prices for saronite are a little higher than in the past- closer to 14g per stack, but you can get it for 13g per stack. However, it might be better to buy the raw gems- Huge Citrines and Sun Crystals are go as low as 50s per piece (10g per stack); they normally sell for 75s per piece (15g per stack). Eternal Earth? That’s cheap too. I can get earth for 30g to 40g per stack. Let’s do the math:

30s-40s for 2x Crystalized Earth + 50s-70s for a gem= 1-4 Infinite Dust

The result? You’re paying about 1g for something that sells for 3g-12g in the middle of the week. That’s a great margin.

So, it appears that the shuffle is back! It’s not back to the strength that it once was, and this version of the shuffle requires particularly specific AH timing. However, it’s a market and it’s one worth exploring.

One caveat- don’t hit this hard! Start slowly at first and test the demand. I’m able to sell about two to four stacks a day; some days are better than others.

A final piece of advice- the weekend is coming, so take the chance to stock up on mats if you’re going to try this out. Look for cheap gems, cheap saronite ore, and especially, cheap eternal earth. Demand and supply are at an equilibrium on most servers for earth, but the overall volume of the stuff is low. It will only take a few people on your server aggressively buying all cheap mats to raise the cost to the point that this is not profitable. So go get those mats and start shuffling!

GL! /bow

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