I appreciate your advice and concern but I am definitely staying w the agar, LC, and attempting to do the spore swab tek to try n make a hybrid.
To make a true hybrid (mating of different strains) you need to isolate a few monokaryons (the more the merrier, of each strain).
All spores sprout as monokaryons but they don't stay that way for long. Spores usually sprout while in close contact to thousands of other spores, so compatible matings that produce dikaryotic strains occur almost immediately, so you'll need to do serial dilutions of spores in water to reduce their number enough to prevent that from happening before you can transfer them as monokaryons to try to hybridize them.
If I'm going to do something, I go all the way in, 110%. I've probably spent the better part of 3 or 4 wks reading and watching EVERYTHING
A good start. FWIW, many of the people offering you advice have been doing this stuff consistently for decades.
I know that it can be an annoying analogy, but we really do have to learn to crawl before we can walk with this stuff. If you want to run a marathon, giving 110% effort doesn't help if you haven't learned how to walk yet thanks to skipping over the crawling phase. The reason why this is necessary is that "in theory there should be no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there's a difference" (not sure where that originally came from but it's an old thought).
Book learning is extremely limited in the context of growing fungi. Research is only helpful to learn how to start learning how to grow, which requires hand's-on practice as that teaches all the things about it that are really hard to convey, like how to develop an "eye" (or a "nose") for trouble.
It's really how I learned anything growing up.... by taking advice from as many people as I could and applying the best of the info I had to my particular situation.
That usually backfires with fungi (making it take longer to succeed, not less time) since it tends to lead to mixing-and-matching different TEKs, which in turn usually leads to failure (see comment about theory vs. practice above). Or at least this has been the most common outcome in my own experience when I was a rookie and what I've seen happen over and over and over again on this site during my past ~16 years here.
Besides, agar and LC look much easier than alot of the other things I've done. Growing these magic Fungi seem more of a medium on a difficulty scale.
IME the difficulty is a function of the desired output. For example, it's a lot easier to grow a head-stash of fungi that it is to grow a head-stash of cannabis. But it's a lot easier to grow a commercial quantity of cannabis than it is to grow a commercial quantity of fungi (legal or otherwise).
