Alright, so, what prompted me to make this thread? In truth, I had been meaning to make it for a while now. I have a tumblr blog that I made a few posts on, but could never consistently post on it, due to the format. So this thread is meant to be a replacement for that, as it both reaches a large audience, and is also easier for me to get to. Here, I plan to share the ups and downs of having an insane number of breeding projects, from daily ramblings to longer stories.
But, what finally lit a fire under my tail and got me to sit down and make this thread, is probably my latest project, which is the Red/Red/Goldenrod or Metals project. Because it is, in many ways, very reminiscent of a certain infamous project I once had.
I go into detail about it on
my blog, but here is a more concise version.
Crimson/Crimson/Violet, Crystal/Facet/Circuit Coatl female. Today, you might have a little difficulty with breeding one, but not to the extent that it'd go down in infamy among all your friends. That's because today, there do exist dragons that are near these colours with appropriate genes, and we also have this luxuriously easy to use Auction House now.
When I started this project on May 26, 2016, in addition to using the old Auction House,
which operated like the Dragon Search does now (which is horrible and I wish they'd update it like the Auction House) (June 8, 2019: oh hey wish granted), a lot of the dragons you see today in that colour range simply did not exist.
Except for that one super expensive breeding pair, whose market I inadvertently destroyed in the process of completing this project. Oops?
Crimson/Crimson/X are a dime a dozen, and were a dime a dozen even back then. The trouble was, that X, was exclusively between Ice and Lemon. Even among the red ranges, the tertiary never strayed beyond those two colours, and if you go and check, you'll find that, when paired together, those two colours, the closest options I had, would not cover the purple range.
This project was, quite literally, impossible, until I found Torn, a month and a half after starting the project:
Take a look at her parents; she was a fluke baby in the red range for primary and secondary, and, Jungle, her tertiary colour, could finally pair with Ice.
From there, this insane project unfolded. Because I literally had exactly one possible pairing, I couldn't do a normal
pyramid project, so I had to go with breeding 5 generations of dragons, back and forth across the purples - if the next generation was on the Nightshade side of Violet, I find them a yellow-tert partner; if they were on the Grape side of Violet, I find them a partner in the whites.
Meanwhile I was breeding Torn and her partner over and over again, trying to get a dragon as close to Violet as possible, and created multiple bloodlines in the process, that, well over a year later, finally got to the point of being able to be bred together. In the end, I had multiple pairs producing super close babies, and it was only a matter of time and luck before I would get the final baby, 18 months after I started.
With careful counting, I discovered I bred 186 dragons in the process. At first, they sold like hotcakes, 50-80k each, constantly. Many of those dragons went on to create their own pairings as this once-impossible niche became exposed. Then it slowed. And slowed. By the end of the project, I could barely sell any dragons for above fodder prices.
Two years later, you'll find that the prices of triple gem gene red-range/red-range/purple-range Coatls are no longer fodder prices, but they aren't the 800k they once were. The project, while it was in progress, was endlessly frustrating. But, it sure made for one hell of a memory, and has brought me a lot more amusement the more I look back on it.
And, y'know what was one of those lessons I took away from it? Your Iron Man dragon is really, really not special. It is super common, so common that it, along with other popular combinations, floods the market, and shoves aside anything outside the norm, which makes it very difficult to acquire new and unique combinations - if they don't exist, then one needs to create them through breeding far-ranged dragons and hoping the babies hatch with colours anywhere near the goal, and as illustrated in this story, sometimes that isn't even possible.
The Dragonwish Foundation gets a lot of really odd and interesting dragon requests, simply because people don't know how to make them happen otherwise, or it is very difficult, and I guess we've proven that no matter
how difficult, we'll still get the dragon.
So, colour me surprised when someone submits a request for an Iron Man dragon... and actually makes it different enough from the norm, to be very, very difficult to get, indeed.
