Hey there's stuff you may not of heard before in here. This is my knowledge collected from being a new player to getting somewhere not new. :) Work smart or work hard.

1. The pound can be fun and insanely powerful if utilized like a stategist.
If you are spam refreshing the pound looking for a pet named "Perfect***" or "GP3 Green", a deviant skin with the skin library open in a new tab, a rainbow jar pet, or a high level- you're actually not being effecient and tactical at all. YES you can find all of those things and I've found all of them at some point by pound refresh hunting, but a much better approach is the following:

Get a wordpad document or prepare to bookmark pages. Now, the super fun part. First, you need to find good players. You can use the community -> weekly charts (or overall charts) to find and click on player names. You can also use price -> highest first for deviant breeders in the auction house.

Once you find a player with dedicated breeding projects and perfect pets, FIND THEIR BEST MALES. Or public stud males they have up for breeding! What you want to do is fine a male with preferably a ton of children, or even maxed breeding slots. If you see a male come up in the auction house for somewhat cheap because they have maxed out breeding slots, bookmark him.

See how there is an orange number next to "Children"? Click that, and it will open a display of all of the pet's offspring. On the right for "Keeper" you're looking for Pound. 

What you want to do is find a trend of users breeding great females to a public stud male, or someone trying to breed perfect deviants. The most recently born children are at the bottom of the list, so start from the bottom where the pet quality is usually the best. If there is a player owned pet toward the bottom, see if that pet has perfect/great traits. If it does, adopt the pet from the pound above it- it was probably a failure toward the pet kept, especially if several breedings were just trying to make a perfect deviant. Especially privately. :)

Since you can only send 5 pets to the portal servie a day, some players with PAGES of breeding attempt tabs need to get rid of the used pet stable slots fast and stop trying to sell them all, then just toss them in the pound to get rid of them. If they were private breeding, those are females not related to any public stud male and worth a lot- you want to get them. Or even a male for private breeding use.

You can get far more deviants by collecting good breeders, and way more coin, than just hoping to find a single deviant by pure luck. And you get more control over the quality. You can use almost perfect females just to breed great pets with public studs, and sell those.

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2. Buy cheap female GP3 pets, especially double pattern or double color.

They don't even have to be good. As long as there are no red stats, these pets are still three times more powerful (usually) than their no genetic power kind. If you spam breed for deviants to public males, you can then sell their deviant offspring for a chunk. Be patient and don't make the buyout too low- but also be fair enough someone will bid at all. With the revenue, you can buy pets you actually wanted and then ditch the foundation females you started with to make room for the better pets.

Even inbred deviants can still turn at least 75k if visually different, so keep spam breeding to keep the money rolling.

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3. Don't be a loner.
Plenty of players are sitting on resources they basically can't use because there is nothing to spend them on end game, and you need that wood to build buildings. Look for giveaway threads, make friends. People don't enjoy grinding the map for tack workshop creation items (chitin, feathers, etc) or dyes, so you could go grind those things with any of your gp3 animals and build up a supply to offer to a new friend for trading fairly. Many older players enjoy crafting tack workshop items- even if you don't have the tack workshop, your items are still extremely valuable to them since few people are selling them.

Try to make friends. Join a colaberative deviant breeding group. Join a Discord. Be a nuisance just a little bit and reach out here and there- without begging for things. Just say "Hey I saw you had a perfect puma, I'm kind of new and I have this great female, could I breed to him just one time?" and let the ball roll from there.

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4. Make your needs known.

If you have a SPECIFIC item you're in dire need of, write it in your signature, or your profile. Don't beg for end game content like battlegrounds drops or premium stuff, unless you have a specific offer. "Trading 500 vermillion for (thing) I could really use!" etc. (Price varries, obviously.)

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5. Items for Gold

Making the weekly item trades list for 10 gold at the end of the week is easy because not many people are selling things. Things are hard to get, and if they have any sell value, there isn't much of a point to sell them when there isn't a lot of things to spend silver on anyway- it's better to just keep the items you have. You can take advantage of that by selling as many tackworkshop creation items (Chitin, feathers, fur, so on) as possible and easily get that sweet gold- plus line your pockets! This really helps early game. A lot of late game players will gobble them up because see artical "What do I spend silver on now anyway?". Pets and stuff don't come up often so people sit on silver for a long time waiting for something worthy of their investment.

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5. Astrologist
Volcano + astrologist level 3 set to vermillion while you grind for stuff to sell = vermillion stacks. :) Event coming up where people need quartz to make deviant extraction equipment? Swap vermillion to quartz, ride the market waves. Jack up those degen deviants because people will be extracting them and trying to buy them during tundra.

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6. Stop Eating the Magic Food
Magic food is best utilized on perfect pets you really bred for and were already naturally gifted with great stat distribution at birth. Early game, trading that magic food is WAY more useful than feeding it to pets. You can trade 1 nutpea for 75 wood and someone will accept that trade every day. (Or at least they did for me.) When you can't make friends, can't find things for sale, golems aren't fast enough, grinding is hard, just insert magic food and receive building materials via item exchanges. Use your 10 weekly coins on magic food if you're really hurting for building materials for 10 powerful trading tokens.

Thank you (Posted from kid's account who stores for me and barely plays)

The rest:

I want to add for elite pound hunting a few additional tips:

If a player -refuses- to put pets into the pound but has great stuff, on the children tab just follow any pet that is owned by someone other than the player. (It means they gifted or sold a pet they bred.) Often other players will behave differently and actually pound some of the results, while maintaining the original line. I've found some drool worthy lykos this way!

Old genes- 

Some genes just aren't popular and you're never going to find a perfect version of the exact gene set you want. However, finding years old great pets from the pound via genetic line tracing and hunting can revive some life into your projects. I wanted a lykos with beserk instead of quickmind, or steel muscles instead of hound. They are out there, just not popular, and this method will sometimes uncover genes you're looking for. Even if the pet doesn't have two copies, even carrying one copy when you really, really need it without breeding from total scratch (not worth it unless new species released) will go a long way in your project.

Wisteria, these tips are AMAZING, and I found them super helfpful even for a well-established, returning player like me.

So helpful, thanks, will probably have to re-read a few times totake it all in but great advice.  Thanks Wisteria