The first Guardian Cubs are now showing up in auction houses around Azeroth.
Here are the prices I saw this evening on the servers to which I have easy access.
Eldre’Thalas (PvE Alliance) – 3 Cubs Listed
Bid/Buyout
- 20,000/25,000
- 20,000/25,000
- 21,249/24,999
Eldre’Thalas (PvE Horde) – 1 Cub Listed
Bid/Buyout
- 18,000/28,000
Hyjal (PvE Alliance) – 4 Cubs Listed
Bid/Buyout
- 14,249/14,999
- 14,250/15,000
- 18,999/19,999
- 140,000/140,000
Lightninghoof (PvP Horde) – No Cubs Listed
Thrall (PvE Alliance) – No Cubs Listed
20-25,000 seems to the middle ground for the few auctions I have seen, with the low bid price being 14,249 gold, while the high end stands at 140,000 gold.
Of course, I have no idea if there were lower priced ones listed that sold already. That is just my snapshot as of 00:30 UTC.
A quick price check at a likely gold selling site showed me $10, the price of a guardian cub, was currently buying 7,000 units of illicit WoW gold. That might lead one the believe that, perhaps, an asking price of 140,000 gold for a $10 Guardian Cub might not be a sustainable price. Misplaced logic might lead you to conclude that legal gold ought to command a premium over illicit gold, so the price might be more reasonable at, say, 5,000 gold per cub. We shall see.
What sort of prices are you seeing on other servers?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
It’s ten dollars! Considering how long it takes to get a significant amount of gold (or effort, or both) why not just go BUY it already?
I mean, it *is* cute and all, but c’mon. 140,000 gold? For a PET?
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I’m interested in Blizzard’s response when the price eventually drops and it’s cheaper to buy gold from gold sellers and then buy the pet than buying the pet directly.
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It’s going for 6,000 gold on Argent Dawn, or at least was yesterday in the trade channel. The AH has them priced for 10-18k.
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That’s cheaper than I thought they’d be going for. The biggest money sink in WoW for most players is maxing out your flying, and that will run you around 10K gold. That’s not very hard to save up.
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@Nils – I expect that the price of the cub will quickly drop to a point where illicit gold is a little cheaper. However, given the risk involved (Blizzard confiscating your ill-gotten gold if they find out) guardian cub gold ought to be worth some premium.
That said, if illicit gold becomes 5 or more time cheaper than going the guardian cub route, then the experiment is unlikely to be a success.
@Yeebo – The thing is, it is not hard to save up that much if you focus on gold. I get the feeling that most people do not focus on that so long as they have enough to cover what they need for the moment.
We shall see what the weekend brings to the price of guardian cubs.
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As of last night the prices on Wyrmrest Accord(RP) were 25,000, 24,999, & 20,000 gold.
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If the price drops too low on the cub, Blizzard just releases another pet I imagine.
As for the 10kg price eh, just doing dailies can get there fairly quickly and very easily these days. It used to take a couple hours or so to max out my daily list but these days I can do it all very quickly thanks to the Molten Dailies and others. But hey if people don’t want to do dailies and instead want to spend 10 bucks on the gold, more power to them. They aren’t buying themselves anything I can’t get in game my way, and BoE stuff they can buy is normally not BiS any way.
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As of 1830 PST. 11/3
Antonidas – Horde
3 auctions @
19k / 20k
1 @
11k/20k
Hyjal – Alliance
3 @
10k / 12k
4@
19k/20k(3 are the same player)
Hyjal – Horde
5@
6.5k/ 7k
10@
8.5k / 9.5k
11@
21k / 22k (all same player)
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Just a note on the gold… it might be easy at the level cap or if you’re an Auction House ace, but plowing through the leveling curve, even the 5000 gold for Artisan Flight is a significant speed bump.
…so I have to wonder who the target customers are. Who really buys illicit gold? I submit it’s less likely to be level-capped characters, but I have naught but rationale to back that up.
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