What are the best 'must-have' bp's for a beginner collection?

[mainbutter]

If your intentions are to build your personal collection and to not sell or make money then it's simple. Get what you like and can afford.

Very well put, I was going to say something similar but not quite as simply

Here's what we did:

We talked about various projects that we wanted to work on. Both me and my gf wanted to do some kind of multiple combo thing. We shopped around for months until the right animals for that project popped up, they were in our price range, and we jumped on them.

In the end we decided we love to work with colors over pattern, so we're pursuing producing SPOGS, and eventually other traits combined with our SPOGs.

So for us, "must-haves" are animals that are at least het hypo and pastel.