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It will be a year ago on Valentine’s Day that I first discovered H&J. I started on Bluegrass and did everything wrong, then I joined this server and Mesa and proceeded to do everything wrong differently. I created a second account here on Forest in June and it has been my most successful because I finally discovered the value of show ponies. I merged my old Forest stable into this one in November.

I know that I’m far from having everything all figured out, but now that I’ve been playing for a while I’ve come up with new ideas to up my game. This is my game plan for 2023.



Breeding:
Even though I’ve discovered the value of show ponies, I enjoy breeding beautiful evenly bred foals so much that my show horse to breeding horse ratio is still way off. I also need to work on improving the quality of foals that I am producing, so here is the plan - I’m going to whittle my foundation brood band down to a carefully select few (3-5) for each of my special foundation studs. I’ll flush these mares and create foals in the lab; I’ll max out the best and sell the rest.

Until I accumulate enough maxed 2Gs that have leveled off in training to fill my big pasture, I’m going to fill my pasture with exceptionally perfect foundations; I will keep twice as many mares as it takes to fill my primary pasture. I will try to find as many mares possible that have 400+ points for this purpose so that they will still be earning a little bit of a daily bonus while out to pasture. The first pasture breeding of the season will be on 30 day pasture bonus mares. I’ll auction the BA spelds and Red/B papered foals with a PT below 10. I’ll SBA the Red/B papered foals with PTs of 10-10.5 and put them for sale in my chat and auction any that are left over at the end of the month. I’ll run comparison tests on the Blue/A papered foals and Red/B foals with a PT above 10.5 and decide if there are any that I want to max/keep, and sell the rest on the forum. If any come out yellow/c papered they will be sold back to the game.

After I do the first pasture breeding I’ll pull the first round of mares out of the pasture and replace them with the second batch. These mares won’t have a pasture bonus, so their foals will just get breeding advice, genetic tested, and tossed into the auction. The second batch of mares will remain in the pasture to get a pasture bonus before they are bred the next season and the cycle will start all over. Once I have enough 2Gs accumulated, I will sell the foundation ExPerfs and restock my pasture and rotation barn with 2Gs.

My small pastures will be handled in the same manner except they will be used for specific projects… I’ll rotate groups of rank specials selected for my GMT boys through the first small pasture. The second small pasture will be a rotation of high quality mares that I acquired from @Wolfgang Pride to preserve some of my favorite of her lines while she is away from the game. I hope to be able to afford to splurge on a couple new pastures this spring.



Showing:
I will keep trying to acquire high daily payout horses through the auction, public sales, chats and forums… but in an effort to save my hbs for more barns, I’m going to put my real life horse trading skills to good use too… I’m going to put optional offers in my forum breeding and sales ads to trade straws or foals for aging show ponies. Once I can afford to purchase and fill another 210 barn with pointed show ponies, I’ll start saving hbs for the big barn so I can try my hand at bootstrapping.



2023 H&J resolutions:
• I will not buy ponies just because they are pretty unless they have 600+ points.
• After I finish my current foundation GMT projects, I will not start any more! I will save my GMTs for improving the future generations of the lines I’ve already created/acquired.
• I will not break down and buy the barn builder tack packs until I’ve gotten the barns needed to implement my grand plans.



2023 H&J goals:
•Get my daily payout up to over 200k by the end of the year (I’m at just shy of 60k now)
•Secure a regular spot on the leaderboards with at least one of my breeding lines.
•Add at least two 210 stall barns and one 1000 stall barn to my stable.
•Add at least one 30 acre and one 60 acre pasture to my stable.




Sooo… your read all that? I was mostly just putting in print so I can hold myself accountable, but If you have any suggestions to help along or improve my plan I’d love to hear them. I’d also love to hear all y’all’s goals and plans for H&J domination in 2023!