Make Huge Amounts Of Gold Investing In This Item (Patreon)
Content
Disclaimer: The following article recommends a strategy which is similar to those used by professional gamblers. There is an element of risk in the short-term using this method. If you have an addictive personality or are very risk-averse this method is NOT recommended
Summary
1. Buy Cards Of Omens From The Auction House At UNDER 4.5 Gold. It MUST be UNDER 4.5 GOLD.
2. Go To End Of The Deadmines Instance, Engage Captain Cookie and stack his haste buff up to 3000%.
3. Flip The Cards. Vendor them.
4. To Withstand Losing Streaks I Would Recommend Having At Least 100k In Gold To Start With.
Detailed Explanation
There is an item called "Card Of Omens"
https://www.wowhead.com/item=113355/card-of-omens
Which can be mass-produced in the Draenor garrison*. For all practical purposes these are wow's scratch cards, yielding any amount between 1 copper an 6000 gold when flipped.
There is a huge amount of data on the average return from flipping fortune cards, for example, here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/4kcwu9/flipping_250k_cards_of_omens/
This is the largest recorded sample size I could find by one individual, stating a return of 4.63 gold per card over a 250k sample size. All other statistically significant sample sizes I have seen recorded suggest over 4.5 gold per card.
To make money from fortune cards in theory is simple: purchase any card from the auction house below 4.5 gold.
Your expected profit should be 4.5 gold - what you paid. So you would make 0.5 gold per card purchasing them at 4.0, (There are currently thousands on the ah at this price). or 1 gold per flip if you can purchase cards at 3.5 (I have seen cards posted at this price).
In 9.2.7 the changes to the auction house making commodities region-wide mean that there are many cards on sale and the price often dips below 4.5.
This is one of the simplest and effectve ways to make money in wow. If you can purchase, say 15000 cards at exactly 4 gold your expected profit is an instant 7500 gold, (ignoring the question of how to flip the cards which we'll come to).
Now it is a bit more complicated than that because of the huge fluctuations around the expected profit. This is mainly because much of the average value of a card is tied up in a 6000-1 profit.
Without the larger payouts your returns will only be 2-3 gold. You could be losing gold for thousands, even tens of thousands of flips, with extremely bad luck. I would recommend not doing this with less than 100000 gold for that reason.
Now you actually have to flip the cards, which can take a while. Fortunately the time it takes to flip a card is reduced by haste. The best method I have ever found is to take the cards to the end of the Deadmines Instance, engage captain cookie but do not kill him, and use the haste buff from his food to increase your haste by up to 3000%.
Alternatively flipping the cards is an excellent way to way to fill in the downtime : whilst waiting in raids, at the start of battlegrounds etc.
Finally you can automate or semi-automate the process fairly easily with something as simple as a mouse recorder. But as this carries major ban potential I'm not going to go into further details on this.
*(Here is an older article I wrote on the subject of actually producing the cards)