I think in the end it depends on how many of which combo's you would want to make. I think that pastels and spiders are both awesome base morphs, since you can do so much with them. If you want to do a lot of the spider combo's, I would say get a male spider so you could breed him around with multpile females of different morphs to produce the designer morphs faster. I think it really depends on what you want to end up breeding. If it was me, I'm going to get a spider female, because I already have a pastel male (as well as a normal female). One of the projects that I would like to work on would be the pewter bee, or even a super pewter bee, so I would also need to get a female cinny. I'm interested to see how the pattern/coloring would differ from an axanthic/ killer axanthic bee.