HGG Community Forums

Merging horses is expensive so I rarely do it. Things to keep in mind. You can’t clone a merged horse. The age, gender, and breeding ability are taken from the primary horse. This is important if you are merging full siblings, and one has the breeding ability you want, the other with the colors.
Who you decide to merge is entirely personal preference, and what you breed for. For best breeding ability for foundations I personally would do either a PF or ExPro for the main horse. But the second horse could be whatever foundation you wished. Even a spayed or gelded one.

Personally I really love cloning. However you can only clone horses you have bred. The base price for cloning is 1 Iv and the price goes up for each fancy thing on that horse. I currently have a stallion who would cost over 600 Iv’s to clone. The price also goes up after each time cloned. I only clone my favorites.

You can not clone a merged horse.

While merging is fun for having brindles/chimeras, I've found it to be a very specific use case: in that it's very good if I specifically want a wider assortment of genes in my herd, since I can, for example, get four phantom genes into a herd with one stud. However, you also have to consider: why not just use two boys with two phantoms each? Especially since one stud can only offer 50 breedings while two can of course give 100? So merging is useful when:
- you want variety but also to guarantee certain genes bought from the RGS (hom satin, for example, or any other such thing, will be cheaper to only buy once/twice to get on all strands than to do four times)
- you have limited pasture space (if you want twelve phantoms and have a 100 acre pasture, then you would need three chimeras to do so, for example).
- you want to make expensive edits to the horse as a whole, like boosting by 5%, in which case it's better to have one horse with the assortment of genes instead of two separate ones

So it's one of those things that's fun to do for the heck of it once or twice, but I would make sure before you commit to a serious merge project that you see if it couldn't be done equally well with just two horses. Run your numbers before going through with it and compare against the breedings you'll get, and see if it's a worthwhile investment for you :)