New to ball pythons morphs, plan of attack?

[SarWildDog]

So, earlier this year I went to my 2nd reptile expo with the plan of picking up a 1.1 pair of candy cane corn snake hatchlings, though I knew there was a possibility of my picking up a decently priced ball. Unlike the previous expo I had been to, there were next to no corn snakes and ball pythons dominated the room. Having only really read up on care, and not morphs, I ended up looking around at snakes in my price range. I settled on a gorgeous, bright pastel from Priceless Pythons and my little Leopold II sparked my morph craze.

Since then, I've been reading and drooling over many different morphs and have decided that I want to join in on the breeding fun. Since I'm starting out, I decided that I should go for some of the basic co-dom morphs to get started while on a budget. I've decided that I need a mojave, a lesser or two, a spider, and maybe a fire. I was thinking that I would buy young female(s) of the morphs I need because I've seen breeding size males of these morphs go for bargain prices for people who are replacing them with their higher-end offspring. I figure that holding off on buying the males until I need them/ find a good deal, would be a better plan than starting out with them as hatchlings.

Any advice for getting started, and my plan of attack?

[Wapadi]

Well you might wanna start by collecting all your equipment first

Rack system Incubator
Food supply Plan on what to do with the offspring
QT area
Vet

and then start picking up the animals
Most of us are bitten by the Ball Bug very shortly after bringing one home so better prepared than sorry!!!
Definitely pick up your females first as they take the longest to grow up!
Good Luck and have fun! Remember don't breed what you think might sell, breed what interests YOU!!

[SarWildDog]

Thank you for the response! Thankfully, I have most of that sorted already and I do plan on breeding what I like Honestly, most of my favorite morphs are those that don't alter the natural pattern much, other than in color. So, most of the high end stuff doesn't hold much interest in me Though BELs are gorgeous and definitely in my plans.

[4theSNAKElady]

I love your animated avatar!

sent from my incubator

[Kaorte]

I think that your strategy sounds good. If I would have gone back and changed which animals I go, I would have gotten less single gene males. At the time, multigene males were still on the expensive side so I opted to get some high quality single gene males.

I just wish I had more breed-able females because of my original 6-7 animals, only 2 of those females are breeding size. One of the "females" was mis-sexed, so that didn't help either! Since then, I have picked up a lot of single and double gene females that should be ready to breed by fall of 2014 or 2015. Quite a long wait, but I have some really fun males to pair with my single genes, double genes and normals until then!

[SarWildDog]

Thank you I have my pastel, and I had the opportunity of picking up a breeding size pair of het pieds at a steal price. I'm also talking to someone with het albino hatchlings at a good price.