I wanted to see to what extent this was useful and see whether conventional wisdom is accurate in this case. Using the set of Apterous conundrums (thanks Charlie) I wrote a program that looked at the number of conundrums that contain a given set of letters (say I, N, G) and compared this with the number of conundrums that began/ended with those letters (-ING in this case). So in effect it assesses the positives-to-decoys ratio.
I decided to post this here rather than in the Apterous subforum because I think the findings should have some use with respect to the show, with the caveat that heat game conundrums tend to have more common affixes than the whole Apterous set; finals (and CofC) game conundrums have less.
PREFIXES
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73% of 30 - COMM
61% of 184 - EX
42% of 55 - COMP
41% of 173 - OVER
41% of 66 - SQ
33% of 1269 - RES
28% of 149 - QU
24% of 96 - APP
23% of 1308 - UN
22% of 183 - UNDER
21% of 196 - SUB
20% of 227 - FOR
18% of 564 - CON
16% of 437 - PRO
15% of 144 - IMM
14% of 605 - DIS
12% of 199 - SUP
11% of 412 - OUT
10% of 3144 - RE
09% of 693 - PRE
07% of 342 - INTER
07% of 498 - MIS
SUFFIXES
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94% of 33 - FULLY
87% of 30 - OLOGY
76% of 1474 - ING
75% of 75 - IZED
72% of 53 - OUSLY
68% of 481 - NESS
62% of 798 - LY
58% of 60 - IFIED
50% of 2244 - ED
50% of 42 - WORK
48% of 48 - BOARD
44% of 315 - ABLE
42% of 206 - IZE
42% of 78 - ABLY
29% of 252 - LESS
27% of 812 - IEST
24% of 471 - TION
22% of 97 - IZER
21% of 482 - ATED
20% of 405 - IVE
14% of 3144 - ER
14% of 498 - ISM
12% of 1450 - ATE
10% of 396 - SION
The next step would probably be an attempt at identifying letter modifiers to a prefix or suffix (e.g. perhaps the presence of the letter F increases the chance of an -ING ending to 85%, etc).
Another idea I've had is to take, for example, the 24% of words that contain I, N, G but do not end -ING. Perhaps there's a useful set of suffixes to check for ING-decoys. Some research into a blended strategy (if one tries both -ABLY and -ABLE what are the chances of success?) could also prove fruitful. But that's for another day.