Mists Gold-Making Speculation: Pet Cages

So... I'm sure most people already know about the new Pet battle Mini-game set to come with Mists. There's another thing pet related, however, that has me even more excited than the thought of following in the footsteps of the great Ash Ketchum. Since I've been into Pokémon since elementary school, this is a pretty big deal.

As I'm sure you can guess from the title, yes, it's Pet Cages. What are they? Well for starters, profitable. The idea is simple enough, you right-click a pet, select "Put in Cage," and just like that the pet leaves your pet journal and enters your inventory as an item. There's nothing you have to buy from a vendor or anything; the pet becomes the Pet Cage. The best part? There's no restriction on which pets you can cage up and which you can't.

I never liked my baby blizzard bear anyways...

So, aside from leveling pets for profit, there are other ways to take advantage of this. If you aren't a collector, you could just sell off all the pets you worked hard to get. If you are a collector, expect to finally have another way to get your hands on that pet you've been eyeing. If you are like me, then you will want to get the most out of this.

So the question for a collector who's also interested in profits is: Which pets can be acquired more than once but are hard enough to get that people will pay a premium? The easy answer are going to be pets you currently have that are bind on account and not consumed on use, like the baby blizzard bear. I'm sure in the future there will be some sort of inhibitor on pets like this, since you can soon cage them up and sell them. So, the sooner you pass them around and learn them on all of your characters, the better. There's also collector's edition pets, which is an easy one since you just have to make a level one to pump out another.

If that's not enough for you, there's also those pets that you acquire by doing some sort of rep grind or whatever, then purchase from a vendor. Come Mists either you will be able to keep pulling them from the auction house and posting them on the auction house or it will be patched somehow. If you like to prepare for the worst then you might want to buy a bunch of them before the expansion and stash them somewhere. It seems unlikely, but if Blizzard does end up hot fixing rep vendors, that little space sacrifice could win you big. A few examples are: Nurtured Penguin Egg, Tiny Sporebat, Nether Ray Fry, Hyjal Bear Cub , and Crimson Lasher.

So what does this all mean? Maybe next time you run Magisters' Terrace for your Swift White Hawkstrider , you should hold on to those extra Phoenix Hatchling . They might come in handy someday.