what stinks about a melanistic flame is that you won't be able to tell it's a flame, because melanistics are all black and the black obscures all of their other colors. It's cool to have to the two genes together though, so you could produce flames and melanistics in the same litter. Any melanistics you get though you would have to label as "possibly flame" because you won't be able to tell if it is one or not. The only way to tell would be to breed that melanistic to a normal, and you will get either all normals het melanistic, or flames and normals het melanistic. if you get flames then you know that melanistic is also a flame. you just won't be able to see it is all!