Talk:Jade Dragon/@comment-36.234.145.119-20130519060912/@comment-89.67.128.50-20130519080529

When identifying patterns, it would be sensible to make some kind of judgement about how strongly you think it applies. Let's examine three different ones and compare.


 * 1) 1 - combo won't include limiteds (this looks VERY likely.  Possibly I think BFS has confirmed this, but also you can see from a design perspective that it wouldn't be very clever anyway).


 * 1) 2 - if the gem dragon is available at level 14, it probably doesn't include metal.  (This is a pretty good assumption.  You can see how there are possible exceptions, but it is a good basis to start from).


 * 1) 3 - no opposite in combo.  (This seems to be indicated from previous experience.  There is also a POSSIBLE motivation from the developers why they might avoid using opposites.)

You can see that each assumption has varying strength. The strength of the assumption is always open for debate/analysis, but each one is just an assumption. The stronger the assumption, the later in the queue you should look at testing those combos. In the case of the last one, the assumption was not that strong, so it was probably incorrect to hold off testing it for so long. That's not to say it was dramatically incorrect - just that we perhaps might have got the answer faster if we had a better sense of the strength of that assumption. We should all keep open minds.