i've learnt the hard way too that getting a pair, or having one mantis and finding it an opposite gender still puts you prety far from mating, as something can always go wrong like bad moults, incompatibility, unwilling females, spineless males etc etc etc. by having just one pair you are really making it hard for yourself. sometimes you can get lucky and the pair will get to adult smoothly and at similar times and then mate smoothly etc, but most of the time things dont go so smoothly. i would say if you really really want to mate a certain species, make the effort to get a group of them to start with, or get multiple pairs. you end up saving money and effort and headaches in the long run.
