About the socket extracting, I think 300 IM is quite fair. Now from what I understand it's either you pay that 300IM or get those items, if it doesn't work like that ignore this. If it does, the items way shouldn't "cost" much more than the 300 IM way, so around 3k gold. By that I mean the value of the items one would need on average could be like 4.5k max for it to make sense, and that's for the good cards. I don't exactly know how it's now, but that's pretty much how it should be cause that makes sense. Otherwise the other system is obsolete.