It seems that anytime anyone mentions finding a "cheap" <insert morph here>, people comment that just because it's cheap doesn't mean it's good. What does "good" mean? The comments never suggest to the person what they should look for to find a "good" snake, rather than focusing on price, so the comments don't really do much to help the person make a good decision. What makes one snake better than another? Personally, I've seen people say "awesome looking snake" in a comment to a picture, and I find the snake to be ugly. "Unusual" or "novel" doesn't automatically mean "great looking" to me.

To refine my comment, I'm considering a pastel or an albino (or maybe a fire or some few others, depending on how much money I have available when purchase time arrives). I'm 100% willing to pay for quality, but how do I know what "quality" is? For the most part, one albino looks much the same as another to me (I can tell the high contrast from the regs, and lavender obviously is different). Pastels I can tell a bit more, if they're more yellow than yellow-brown (assuming that's a marker of quality and not just my preference).

So...how does a novice know what characteristics determine quality?