Oh, and for potential girls for the pied, I'd buy a few pied females or het pied females depending on how much budget I have. Me personally I wanted to buy like 4 het pied females for my pied male, but I found a good deal on a pied female with some size, so I only got her and one het pied female. I might still want to go get another het pied female, but only because hatchling het pieds are like 50 bucks at shows around me.

Here was my reasoning for getting pied/het pied females. Pieds obviously cost more, usually about 4-5 times more, so financially it's smarter to get a bunch of het pied females. One pied female will give you 6 pied hatchlings (assuming average 6 egg clutch), but for the same price you could easily get 4 het pied females and have extra money for the extra rats. You'll get 24 eggs (average 6 egg clutch) and about 12 of those will be pieds. So for the same price you get twice as many pieds. Downside is now you have 12 het pieds you have to get rid of (unless you still want). For me I want to try to plan pairs that give me as few of the undesirable snakes as possible. I can give them away to people or sell them to wholesale, but I hate not knowing where the snakes are going and I'd know that at least a few were going to shoddy pet stores or sold to people that are not equipped to take care of the snakes. The upside though is if you put all your budget towards one female to get that 100% pied clutch, if she doesn't breed then that whole budget is wasted for the year. Whereas having 4 het pied you have a much better chance of getting locks and ovulations.