Tournament Pets

At the start of Cataclysm I had a death knight on another server, but to make a long story short I quit playing him about this time last year. He literally was completely broke. I started playing him again because my friends over there were active and twisted my arm. My guild is casual enough that I have plenty of time for side projects like this (we only raid twice a week for 2 hours and often times raids are canceled because someone can't make it.)

I dislike waiting for queues and I've always been fond of the blood spec, so I fixated on working on a tank set. Truthfully, I liked the old blood dps much better, which is part of my reason for dragging my feet with the character (and why my glyph dk is only 84). I started with enough normals to buy a few 378 pieces and went right to heroics.

After a few intense seasons, I steadily made money from running dungeons, but in one of the bags, I received a mechopeep. I had sold a few of these during Wrath and bought a few horde set on my alliance characters. My DK was horde and if the pets become account wide, he'll get everything from my shaman. I decided since I had one I didn't need, I might as well try to sell it. Within a few hours, it sold for a tidy sum.

I really don't have ambitions to make thousands of gold on my DK—the money generated will keep me in gems and enchants for awhile. I really wasn't trying to make any money, simply get 378 equipped so I could run with my friends there. 

I started thinking about the tabard that ports you to tournament in icecrown and how fast a level 85 could run those dailies and accumulate pets. If you have two accounts, you could launder the pets to the opposite side. No one knows which pets will be good in the pet battle system yet. Everyone is speculating. This is a great chance to generate pets through hard work and sell them to the side that can't do the factioning. In effect, it is the same as the lanterns.  I bought most of the pets in Wrath for 500 gold each--the fact that the prices have gone up by a factor of 7 makes me predict they'll go up again as gold becomes more plentiful.

Warcraft has traditionally had only two routes of advancement---pvp and pve. Pet battles are a side system and if they are fun, maybe people will really get into it. I've truthfully disliked most of their mini games, though the exception was the Zombies vs Sunflowers. If pets really catch on, this would be a great way to generate funds for a newcomer to the market.