Richard and Paul are both way smarter (and by consequence, way more rich) than I am. They thought ahead, took notes on all the ingredients for the brand new recipes in 2.2, and had all the supplies sitting at high prices on the AH yesterday, ready to be sold to anyone who didn't want to wait to make the new items. Beautiful. I'm jealous-- wish I'd thought of it first.

Soulcloth is the big winner, it seems-- it requires Netherweave (which pretty much everyone has), and tons of Soul Essences, which basically drop like candy in Karazhan. If I recall correctly, Soul Essences have sold ok but not great in the past (at least on my server), and they probably still won't sell well, once everyone's made everything they want. But for the next few days, while everyone's learning the new recipes, you'd probably do well to clean out your Soul Essence inventory.

Primal Shadow and Primal Air are also doing well from the patch, but since those are Primals, they're fairly rare anyway-- if they were really everywhere (like, say, they dropped off of every demon in the world), Blizzard would change things. But over the next few days (and probably every few days after a big set of crafting changes, so keep an eye out for 2.3 profession news), there's lots of money to be made.

In case you really wanted it, the Burning Crusade Collector's Edition apparently isn't all that collected-- it's still in stock at Amazon for $74.99, a few bucks off the original price. The original Collector's Edition is a little harder to find-- it's been out of stock for a while, and copies are going for around $200. eBay is the same story-- you can buy the BC:CE for as little as $50, while the original CE is going for much, much more.

My guess is that it's the old laws of supply and demand-- by the time Burning Crusade dropped, everyone knew it would be a hit, so Blizzard made a bunch, while the original CE probably had a lot fewer copies made. But the noncombat pets might be a draw as well-- the original CE had Diablo, Zerg, and Panda pets, while the Burning Crusade only had a pretty unimpressive Netherwhelp pet.

And the other interesting question is what will happen when the next expansion drops. Being that WotLK is much more integral to the Warcraft that everyone knows and loves (while BC was much more involved with the ancient history of Warcraft), will people who've skipped Burning Crusade so far be more inclined to pick it up when Wrath releases? Maybe the BC:CE will get rarer as we get closer to Northrend.

[ via WoW Ladies ]