You also have to consider that if you want to take spins into consideration, you have to account for the extra time it takes you to spin 3 times every single game, as well as going to the bazaar and going through all your cards, selling the ones you won.
jmdt and I discussed at length the impact spins would have on grinding and I'm going to help him come up with supplementary numbers to add in to the study. These numbers, and future ones, will hopefully make it clearer when grinding what one can expect.
One point we looked at was the actual time it takes to do spins. It was surmised that winning cards may slow down the spinning process since each win from a spin gives an animation of the card won. To test, we looked at the time for spins for each possible instance- no wins, one card won, two won and winning three cards in one session of spins. jmdt put his deck up for farming in T50 with nothing but Stone Pillars (much to the disgruntlement of farmers I imagine) so that I may come across it for test purposes.
The answer was in all tests (50+), including testing the spins from jmdt's farm deck, the time was the same- 8 seconds.
(Example for testing purposes previously in this thread) (
http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,11935.msg159015#msg159015)
I thought it interesting to take a look at the effect spinning would have, so I went back to my previous example as linked just above.
Mindless Dragons played 112 games and Mono Darkness played 80. Those numbers did not factor spins due to time to play. They are then an actual representation of what one can expect to get in a two hour session of grinding without spinning. But what if that same person wanted to do all spins? The question is now, how many games would we lose to take time to do the spins in the same two hour space, and what might be lost?
We know that each game won includes an 8 second time interval for spinning. And we also know that each deck has an established game/seconds, so we can then add the 8 second interval to both game/seconds ratios and factor. Mindless Dragons would now be 72.0 second/game and Mono Darkness would be 98.36. Therefore, Mindless Dragons now is only capable of playing 100 games in the two hour timeframe (7200 seconds / 72.0 seconds per game) while Mono Darkness goes down to 73 games (7200 / 98.36).
What that tells us is Mindless Dragons lost 12 games while Mono Darkness lost 7 for spinning purposes. We can look at what we would have gained and subtract them out at this point. The average for per/win score and electrum for Mindless Dragons was 18.5625 score and 18.7232. The average for per/win score and electrum for Mono Darkness was 29.3625 score and 31.925 electrum. So the following is what would have been lost to add in the spins that take 8 seconds to do:
Mindless Dragons: -223 score, -225 electrum.
Mono Darkness: -206 score, -223 electrum.
What this means is taking the time to spin further cuts down the amount of score gained. Also, there only would have been a difference of 27 games played in the two hours instead of 32 between the two decks. Those lost games means less opportunity for Mindless Dragons to close the distance of electrum between itself and Mono Darkness.
Again, the main point to grinding AI3 is for
score. It seems rather apparent decks that are faster, like Mindless Dragons, lose a lot more score than decks made for EM purposes, like Mono Darkness, when they stop to spin. Should people skip spins? No, I don't think so. Not everyone can afford to lose the electrum they might gain from spinning. Does spinning drastically cut into your grind-time for score? Yes. But the upside is, if you want to grind for score without giving up your spins, it's still better to go with an EM deck made for AI3. I think it's entirely safe to say it's a matter of quality over quantity when it comes to grinding AI3 for score.
