kings, studs, and raffle lions

(1) 

New king!! My g2 mngwa, smooth boyjazz, took the throne today. I’m only five months late to the mngwa party. pls inundate me with stud requests

(Someone in chat today said, rather disparagingly, that mngwas are the third most common mut on site. Well, it’s fine; I still like them. Also, it’s not necessarily bad for business, considering all the mngwa girls need studs. I got FIVE stud requests today. We are on fire.)

Next in line is Taliesin (stud name pending), another g2 mngwa, though it’s up in the air whether he gets smooth boyjazz’s looks or something new. After that, the tentative plan is to get a nice chunky g2 and give him a pie mod. I have money for a mod, and it’ll mean all the albino challenge cubs have a chance to be pies, which will be fun. Though I might go with ennedi dilali instead, depending on what the breeding mechanics are…we’ll see.

And after that, maybe ascender’s bane the tigon. If I’m still playing by then. By then I’ll have played a full year, seen the whole event cycle, and I’m not sure I’ll want to keep going. Already I can feel myself getting tired of the grind.

• traffic scone (Sept 2025 – Jan 2026): Ysdaar g9, no mut, glass (vibrant pastel)
• casino night zone (Feb-May 2026): Marwolaeth g3, no mut, frostbitten (colorbomb)
• smooth boyjazz (May-Aug 2026): Nefertem g2, mngwa, peach (wine/pink/rose gold)
• taliesin (Aug-Nov 2026): Rubellite g2, mngwa, ???
• ??? (Nov 2026 – ???): ??? g2, pie/dilali?, ???
• ascender’s bane (???): tigon

(2)

My LD pet peeve: obnoxious stud rules. A sizable minority of stud owners are intent on micromanaging the kind of cubs other people might get from their stud. Examples:

• Banning use of ochre powders, gnaws, mukombero, etc.
• Common variant: “If you use X item, you must use the GB option OR pay X extra GB.” wtf is this microtransaction shit?
• And there’s all kinds of hyper-specific variants like “DUs can only use X items” and “You can use X item or Y item but NOT both.”
• Limiting the kinds of lions that can breed to the stud, e.g.:
• “No basic NCLs”
• “No NCLs with under 1000 stats”
• “No lions with under 5 markings”
• “No lions with over X markings in the same slots as my stud”

It irritates me to no end (and further irritates me that it’s considered acceptable behavior in the studding community). The cubs aren’t going to be yours, so stop trying to micromanage them.

Most studs with obnoxious rules have a lot of breed-only marks. The idea is, they don’t want others to “copy” their king by getting a clone or near-clone and kinging them. But if you think your design is sooo special and unique and don’t want to see it in the wild, don’t public stud!! It’s that simple!! Otherwise, it’s self-contradictory. “I want people to like my king’s looks so much they will give me money in hopes of getting cubs that look like him, but I don’t want them ACTUALLY getting cubs that look like him.” lmfao

Plus, a lot of these designs being gatekept are raffle lioness clones (or near-clones). How you gonna be so overprotective about a design you didn’t even come up with yourself?? Like, YOU are already copying someone else’s lion, so don’t be so sanctimonious. 

(3) 

The playerbase’s obsession with raffle lionesses is another thing I don’t vibe with, but I’m willing to chalk that up to aesthetic preferences. I like color, vibrancy, contrast, pop. Raffle lionesses tend to be naturalistic and/or muted, with a lot of blending and high color unity. So people will be drooling over the RL and I’m like “meh, gray lion” but it is fine, we can’t all like the same things. It works in my favor that a lot of the stuff I find more boring is relegated to BO, while many colorful marks/bases I like are easily obtainable as event apps. (And RLs do have some nice stuff, e.g. cassis/briar, algae/bushveld, the occasional scoundrel or prismatic mark…)

Selling raffle lioness clones and near-clones is an entire cottage industry, but if you want an actual raffle lioness, word on the street is that it’ll cost you around 3-4k gc. In one sense, that’s wild for a lion you can’t king (adult g1s are not sex changeable) AND has a limited lifespan. But on the other hand, as jester points out, the game doesn’t really have high-level gc sinks. Oasis items are cheap. Event items have their own currency. There’s no equivalent of FR gem genes to drain one’s wallet. So I can imagine a lot of older players are sitting on multiple thousands of gc…and at that point, why not splurge on a RL if you really like her?

For myself, I made a minor resolution upon entering LD to be more spendy. Use my money to have fun in the moment. But I’m not sure what to spend it on. smooth boyjazz cost me 76 gc (29 for the cub, 25 to king and then replace my looks rep, 6 for marking removers & opac changers, 16 for custom decor). That’s a once-every-three-months expense and I’m still sitting on 462 gc, plus 900 gc worth of buffies (50 @ 18 gc each). That’s why I’m thinking about pie mods and tigons; it’s just something to buy. A marked departure from my usual style of finding a 70 sb cub with fun marks and making her into one of my favorite hunters.