What's your wolf acquisition playstyle? Do you buy, customize, stick with NBWs?

I'm curious about whether we have a lot of different playstyles about how to assemble a pack.  I'm buying random pretty wolves and maybe customizing them a little - but whenever I see a really pretty NBW I start thinking about what it'd be like to have a pack just made of those. Does anyone just use their starters and NBWs and breed their own pack?  (Or did anyone buy their initial wolves but is sticking to breeding now?)  If you're trying to breed your entire future pack, do you use outside studs, or customize your wolves, or anything?

What I did is customize a few NBWS, two females one male, and I'm filling up my pack via breeding. Most my pack is pups that come from my leader and two other girls

My plan is to breed my two starter wolves together and pick from those when it's time to pick a new lead wolf. And then I'm breeding out my NBWs to studs to make more puppies to fill out the pack. I'm also planning to avoid inbreeding.

Huh, now I'm thinking about how hard it would be to have a pack without inbreeding and without outside studs...

@Nika, that's exactly what I'm going for! I sketched out some rules in my profile but I'm not sure how well they will work out yet. Wish me luck! xD

@Kristan that looks like a cool way to do it! I like the competition aspect you have planned out. I'll probably just have my heir be whoever's prettiest, because I'm shallow like that... 

So I find I get overwhelmed easily with buying pets from other people based on what's desirable and popular in most games, so when I started here I decided to just stick with finding a nice group of NBWs I liked plus my two female starters. I'm planning on keeping my current group until the females get close to dying, then I'll breed my starters to other pretty outside studs and maybe my NBW females to my NBW males and see how it goes? Obvs I can only choose one male for that which kinda sucks, but I also haven't done the starter breeding quest yet so it's kinda like a way to have two males bred to my females xD

I might also add some marks to my basic NBW males later on if I have the GC saved, but that defeats the purpose of me doing everything naturally without much outside help... But I'm undecided and got lots of rollovers before I even think of breeding so meh xP 

@Kristan Wow, those are some tough rules, cool!!

@Kitty That sounds like a fun lower-pressure way to play!  On one hand I love buying pretty wolves, but on the other hand checking through all the trades gets so exhausting. Have fun! :D

I have a mix of styles. At level 15+ you can get special based and markings from NBWs. So I am starting a second hunting team to get stats on those. I have bought one pup who is now an adult because I liked her markings and edited her opacities. I am running all female pack (may change). I plan to breed my lead at 5 so I can get a year or two worth of levels from scouting with the heir.

I’m not solid on what my playstyle will settle to yet (or even if it will settle since I keep changing things up on Lioden), but my current plan is thus:

I will have a canon pack that consists of the lead wolf, his or her mate, and their pups. These will fill all the pack roles once I have enough pups. The pups from this pairing are the only wolves who may become the next leader. Either gender may become the next leader.

I will also have an additional hunting team and scout of non-canon wolves that breed to outside studs. The goal with these wolves is to produce the mate of my next leader, and I will have a specific goal in mind each generation.

All of these wolves begin as NBWs (my first pair is the two wolves I made at the beginning of the game), and they only may be lightly customized once they take leadership/become the leader’s mate: two non-opacity changes at maximum with limitless opacity changes.

I’ll avoid inbreeding within my own pack, but I won’t pay attention to the studs’ heritage or if I breed multiple non-canon wolves to the same stud. Once a non-canon wolf has been chosen as the leader’s mate, any parents, children, and siblings still in the pack are to be marked as such or chased so I don’t continue to use them. They will then be replaced by a fresh NBW (which may be a special or chased one).

The purpose is mainly to keep progress within my pack and to keep gaining stats each generation on average, while also not inbreeding too much.