@
emdragon505 your choices really depend on if you're breeding just for colors, or if you want colors and genes.
For my project, the colors I want are unpopular. People dont like yellow, I guess. It's also harder to find xyz that isnt in the same range. Just trying to get the colors I want would take a while, and I'm impatient, so I decided I would rather buy a coatl scroll (2000 gems) and his genes and just focus on colors. When I looked at dragons to buy in the ah as parents, I wasnt deciding which to get based on breed or rarity, I was just looking at colors, so that makes the project a lot easier since there are less variables. It may not be worth it for you to do that, or you might be willing to spend more time on it.
I found dragons based on picking the color I wanted (banana) and then picking one color on each side of the color wheel, slowly expanding outwards until the range was around 5. The important thing to remember is that if you get a male on one side of the color wheel (sanddollar) then you need a female of the opposite side (grapefruit.) This is still a 1 in 3 chance of getting what you want, because the babies could have grapefruit, sanddollar, or banana, but the rng isnt so bad.
I have 10 dragons in my
tab that are various breeds and genes because I'm just trying to make a banana boy. Ideally what you want to do is only have one gene be iffy, not multiple. What I mean is, if I want banana/jade/peridot, and I breed a banana/spring/crocodile dragon with a grapefruit/seafoam/peridot dragon, I can technically get the colors I want. But I'm leaving a ton up to chance on getting all 3 at the same time. So, I got a bunch of dragons with ranges like that example, and bred them until I got kids that will have guaranteed "correct" genes. In this example, I got a banana/jade/spring child, so If I pair her with a male who has banana/spearmint/peridot, then I can simply work on getting either the secondary or tertiary correct because the jade is guaranteed. Then I can take that kid and hopefully have a mate for them and work on the last gene. That way, you can narrow down your variables until you've got what you want. I have to do it this way because there werent enough close dragons to use.
That being said, I did end up using dragon search to find dragons that were one or two off the correct color, and when I asked if I could borrow them for a breeding project people were very kind and willing to help me. You might not always get a good response (dont message people with an unbred g1 dragon in a lair of unbred g1s for example bc they probably wont want to breed them). These pairings gave me hatchlings of my own in the right color range to work with, and since the colors are so hard to find that helps a lot. So if you absolutely cant find anything in the ah theres still hope.
Hopefully this helps a bit.