Static,
In all honesty, how you start really comes down to personal preference.
If you want a tamer that you could login straight off, tame some kitsune and go hunting, then the advanced char would suit you. You'd end up with a mage tamer template from that, which is a pretty standard and decent enough starting point. Where I think the advanced chars are a bit awkward is that you start with a lot of your skill points already trained which would slow down your gains. And if you don't want a mage tamer, you'd have to ask yourself whether it's worth paying that much just for taming.
It's not always a big deal, but you may want to say "I trained all the way from 0" or you might not care. That's another reason that might sway you one way or another. You may have soulstones to pull skills off an advanced tamer char and speed up gains etc etc.
In comparison, you could make the template you wanted from scratch and maximise your gains by training the hardest skills up first, while you're maxed out for GGS and normal gains, then add in other skills later.
As for templates, three good starters are the basic mage tamer, the stealth tamer and a disco tamer.
All would need taming, lore and vet and I'd suggest 110 in each if you want good control of the main pets. The 110 vet and lore give you a better vet capability and also boost your stable slots. (You get +1 stable slot for each skill when they hit GM, 110 and then 120)
After that, your mage tamer would likely add magery, eval and med. That's a basic general purpose template that you may tweak once you're using it, but it's quite easy to configure into various directions.
For a stealth mage, you'd have taming skills + hiding, stealth and magery. I have herding on my stealther for selecting and moving critters out of a spawn for taming. So I've dropped down my stealth to acommodate herding, and I have eval on a soulstone to swap over to. I find that template most versatile, because she's as good at finding new pets as she is at getting away from PKs in Fel. I haven't done peerless with her, but we've handed Doom and harrowers/champs fine, so it's adaptable. If I'm going somewhere dangerous it's my stealther I'll take.
The bard tamer is a good powerful template for PvM. I'd suggest tame, lore and vet then music and disco at 120 for maximum effectiveness and the rest in magery for recalling etc. You're a bit more exposed with the template because you need to stay near a disco'd mob and remain visible to maintain the effect, but a disco tamer can really take mobs down swiftly. Discoing your own pets can also be handy for training them.
Hope all of that helps you a little
Wenchy
