Drawings over scratches every time.
Although scratches have a more spread out "win" possibility, I believe the true odds are worse. What I mean by true odds are, we never know how many tickets are printed up of a particular game. Not only that, all tickets are spread across thousands of stores, depending on our commute, we most likely won't reach a great % of these tickets. Let's take Tennessee's most popular scratch game ($2 - Jumbo Bucks) and use it as an example. According to their website, this is the remaining amount of ticket top prizes.
This is a total of $403,000 winnings, not including the small tier prizes. There has to be a total of 201,500 tickets available to break even and this does not even include other cost to run the game such as ticket printing. That's a crap load of tickets. Now my simple math could be wrong and the lottery could handle their profits/cost in a more sophisticated way then I imagine, but I just don't see how this beats the odds of 1/1000 in a Cash 3 game. Please, anyone that can do the better math or have a better idea on how the scratch game works, chime in. Also, you have other people competing in the same game, taking away prizes. As in the Cash 3 game their can be multiple winners of a particular #.
Instead of purchasing a $20 ticket to chase a $500 win or a Jackpot win. I rather spend $20 on multiple numbers or even just one.
Edit: In this particular game about 150 tickets come on a roll. EVERY store sells this game. If you figure there's about 1,000 stores (which is an understatement really) that's 150,000 tickets of this particular game, searching for one of 605 remaining $500 wins or worse 6 jackpot wins. I'm just rambling here now, but I'd like to also add that stores carry multiple rolls fo this particular game also. No telling how many tickets there are actually printed up of this game.