There has been a lot of talk recently about amalgamated gemstones, and for good reason. The price of them and the sheer volume of orb (etc) required to make them is what has brought them to the front of conversation, but its not the price in and of itself that is the issue, its that there is no reliable way to get them. I have seen multiple threads and talked to others scouring the game looking for each and every source of orbs with the common conclusion that there is no feasible way to farm them.
But there is another item that suffers from the same issue, except that it has no gameplay source at all: Mystic coins. Yes, you can get them from the mystic clovers recipe, but at a 1% chance (according to the wiki) of getting 5 mystic coins back, its a net loss of coins, so I am not counting that.
Mystic coins only come from daily login rewards and the random mystic forger daily. Even assuming that a person gets all of their clovers from pvp, a Gen 2 legendary still requires 250 Mystic coins. What this means is that, depending on mystic forger dailies, mystic coins are little more than ~9+ months of tradeable timegates.
The prices on the TP have been on a general upward trend since the release of the Gen 2 legendaries. Winters presence caused a big spike in the price, but after some decrease due to the demand from winters presence mostly ending, the prices went back to increasing. I am sure there are some people buying some now in preparation for the next set of legendaries and I am also sure that there are some people buying them by the thousands just to flip later.
The issue, however, is not the price, the price is merely a symptom of the issue: that there is no reliable way to get them in the game, just like the amalgamated gemstones. Economically, the price is determined by supply and demand of an item. When the price of an item increases, it means either the supply has decreased or the demand has increased. In the same way, when the price of an item increases, for either reason, players can adjust their gameplay to some extent to offset the price increases. If the price is high enough, gold farmers will adjust to include that item in their farming; crafters will farm that item over buying it. Elder wood is a good example of the latter. The elder wood farm in malchor’s leap has been very busy since the legendaries were released due to the price of elder wood and spiritwood.
However, when the price of an unfarmeable item like mystic coins increases, the only thing that can happen to mitigate it at all is a decrease in demand, ie, people stop making legendaries or other mystic coin items, or put another way, people stop engaging in a part of the game content. Once the stored supply of mystic coins runs out (currently there are less than 17k mystic coins on the TP, a decrease of more than 90% over the last 3 months, and this amount is going down) There will essentially be a cap of the number of legendaries that will be able to be created per unit of daily logins globally. If someone wants to make 1 legendary in less than 9 months, they MUST rely on other people selling their coins either putting off or all together skipping new legendary crafting.
This is not a post to say that legendaries should be easy to obtain. However, ALL of their components should be obtainable purposefully, not randomly (like orb drops for gemstones) and not as an absurdly long timegate (9+months in the case of mystic coins). In my opinion, 75 daily timegates for spirit wood on nevermore is pushing the boundary of a reasonable timegate. mystic coins are far and above that and for the same reason amalgamated gemstones should be looked at, so should mystic coins.