Mojave

[Pythonfriend]

I disagree. Quality and variation makes a huge difference in combos and super forms. But you are right that breeding to different qualities produces different quality offspring. A poor quality single gene wont make as impressive combos as a high quality one. However, having high standards for single gene morphs is a must! Having an amazing base morph will produce amazing combos. Those combos will produce amazing base morphs in return. Its a cycle.

Example, breeding a bright pastel vs a dark muddy pastel will make a huge difference in offspring. Especially in regards to the super pastel and other combos.

Another example on how quality effects a 'combo' is albino. If you breed light colored hets, you get a light low contrast albino, which is not favorable. High contrast albinos are more desired and that can only be achieved though darker hets.

Food for thought.

i agree that the quality of the individual gene is important. Especially in pastel there is variation, enchi used to be enchi pastel, now people talk about lemon pastel, different lines exist, etc. But then with some combos it just goes out of the window. So a quality pastel is light and doesnt darken out too much with age, so i guess you would produce good pastels by breeding to light normals. And with cinnamon, you want the snake to have rich dark browns, so to produce nice single-gene cinnys you would breed to awesome looking dark normals. Now you breed them together to make pewters and it all goes out of the window. And if you then breed the pewter to a normal again, well, the 25% normals you get could be anything from light to dark.

or, your example, you like the dark, high-contrast mojaves. And now you breed a pastave. now what, choose a dark pastel where everyone says it doesnt look like a good pastel on its own? or a nice awesome-looking light pastel? Maybe for that you should have used a lighter mojave with less darkness to begin with.

for high-contrast albinos, you could work with very dark hets, thats one way. But its not that reliable because you dont know how much of the darkness of the dark het is really genetic. If you want a really high contrast albino that will pass on the high contrast when bred to other albinos with a 50% chance, you just go for cinnamon albino or black pastel albino.

i dont say you shouldnt select the best animals for breeding, you definitively should. But when i want a mojave and dont know what projects exactly it will be used for in the future, i would select for health and fitness and nice patterning, but would not select one that is unusually dark or light. Just a very good example on how a normal single-gene mojave should look like, without any other unusual genetics going on, thats what i would want, simple and straightforward.

Best Regards