HGG Community Forums

It depends on what you mean by good.

The short answer is: use all the testing available to you.

The longer answer is that all foundation horses, the ones you can make with the create button, fall into one of two categories. They're either basic creates, or they're exceptional producers. Some of the rank specials are exceptional, some are not. If you use all of the testing available to you, it will weed out any basic creates that are "bad" breeders, leaving you with foundations that are, for lack of a better term, foundation quality. C-papered stallions and yellow-papered mares are foundation quality. Exceptional producers are one step better: they'll all be B-papered stallions and red-papered mares.

Essentially, your line has to start somewhere. Some people prefer basic foundations. They're the easiest to get, most DHHs are basic foundations, and the foundation rescue has a wide range of horses that are guaranteed to be both good (foundation quality) breeders AND good show horses simultaneously. Some people prefer exceptional producers, which give the advantage of basically skipping a generation in quality. (The offspring you want to keep from foundation breeders are Bs and reds.) SOME people prefer boosted exceptional producers; they spend extra money to bump up the quality of their foundations another notch, and skip another generation in the process.

For best results, pair like with like. Regular foundations with regular foundations, exceptionals with exceptionals. It gives you the best margin for getting intact foals, if that is your goal, because breeding inspection compares a foal against the quality of both its parents and if one is a much stronger breeder than the other, it's harder to pass. It's less of an issue if you're pasture breeding.

But basically, if you use all the free testing, your rank specials (and even the not special ones) are as good as you can hope for.