Jeff,
I cannot wait to see Mojave Daddy! Congratulations! Post Pics!!!!!!
First off for the Butter Crystals... I really wanted to produce the first Butter Crystal and Butter Spider Crystal (have to really get the bee naming right before I called them anything), so I picked up a yearling Pastel Butter Spider male last summer. He stopped eating shortly after he got here. He stayed small enough where I decided to breed the Pastel Crystal male to the Pastel Special female instead. Hopefully this year he will knock it out to produce a Killer Bee Butter Crystal!
As for BHBs line of Crystals... He has told me that his Het Crystals (thats what he calls them) are not visible in anyway. I do believe that he has produced a few Lesser Crystals.
As for my line of Specials not being visible. I always tell this story. I owned a detailing business and one of my clients kids sold me the first Special female for $100. I was very new to Ball Pythons and had a Pastel breeder male with a bunch of small females, so I was excited to pick a female up that would breed that year. I thought she looked cool, almost hypoish to me, so I posted pics of her, but got responses like nice normal. So I thought nothing of it. When she hatched her first clutch it was 7 eggs bred to a Pastel. 0.1 Pastel Special, 1.0 Special, 0.1 Pastel, and 0.0.4 Normals. I decided that I would keep the really nice Pastel female because she was night and day prettier than the other. I also called the Special male a Halfstel since I thought he tried so hard to be a Pastel, but just didnt quite make it. If I knew what I know now, I would have bred him back to his mother and produced among the first of the white snakes! Err... well.... White and Orange snakes! Once I produced the Crystal, I thought back about that Pastel female and how stunning she was and who her mother was. That is how I produced Pastel Crystals so early in the project!
The point of that long drawn out story is, if I can pick out a Pastel Special and a Halfstel, opps I mean Special, out of my first 7 eggs ever, then I would guess that just about any experienced keeper could tell a Special from a normal. Mine have a Vanilla-esque look, kinda yb, kinda Fire, but not quite any of those. Dont really look like normals, but I dont have any normal hatchlings to compare them to. Heres three from my last clutch (crappy photo).