Among the more active communities to discuss disc golf on the internet is the subreddit r/discgolf. I frequent the sub and see a lot of posts with folks asking about the “best disc” or for “disc suggestions” for their bags. This got me thinking - can we streamline this and get right down to what Reddit thinks are the best discs?
To do this, I used the package RedditExtractoR to pull comment data from posts to r/discgolf with search terms like “best disc”, “recommend”, or “suggest”. I then filtered down to all of their individual words and matched that against a database of disc names from alldiscs.com and the PDGA’s approved disc database.
For the R nerds, the code and walkthrough is available here. For everyone else, here’s what I found.
Reddit’s Top 20 most discussed discs
Discs ranked by their number of mentions in recent r/discgolf comments about the “best disc” or disc “suggestions” or “recommendations”. Scroll down to see the top 10 for each disc type.
| Speed | Glide | Turn | Fade | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innova Teebird | 7 | 5 | 0 | 2 |
| Innova Aviar | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| Discraft Buzzz | 5 | 4 | -1 | 1 |
| Discraft Zone | 4 | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Innova Leopard | 6 | 5 | -2 | 1 |
| Innova Firebird | 9 | 3 | 0 | 4 |
| Innova Roc | 4 | 4 | 0 | 3 |
| Latitude 64 Pure | 3 | 3 | -1 | 1 |
| Innova Destroyer | 12 | 5 | -1 | 3 |
| Discraft Comet | 4 | 5 | -2 | 1 |
| Latitude 64 River | 7 | 7 | -1 | 1 |
| Innova Nova | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Dynamic Discs Truth | 5 | 5 | 0 | 2 |
| Dynamic Discs Truth | 5 | 5 | -1 | 1 |
| Innova Valkyrie | 9 | 4 | -2 | 2 |
| Gateway Wizard | 2 | 3 | 0 | 2 |
| MVP Spin | 2 | 4 | -2 | 0 |
| Innova Boss | 13 | 5 | -1 | 3 |
| Innova Wraith | 11 | 5 | -1 | 3 |
| Axiom Discs Envy | 3 | 3 | 0 | 2 |
| Dynamic Discs Judge | 2 | 4 | 0 | 1 |
Popular discs are popular
No great surprises here in who is highly ranked - some of the most popular discs on the market are among the most talked about! Reliable midranges like Discraft’s Buzzz and Innova’s Roc show up as some frequently suggested discs, alongside solid fairway drivers like the TeeBird and Leopard (shown here as a a midrange due to alldiscs’s ranking). The Aviar comes up far more often than other putters. The Zone shows up in 4th which seems about right given it’s a great disc (I bag two in my bag of only 15 discs!), but I wonder if it’s a little overrepresented by people just saying the word “zone”.
I found it somewhat surprising how low distance drivers were in the list. The Destroyer is the most discussed distance driver and it only shows up in 9th place. With the Boss and Wraith also in the top 20, only Innova distance drivers make the cut.
I was happy to see that my favorite putter, Gateway’s Wizard, made the top 20 That mold feels amazing in the hand and I love the feel of the SS hemp and glow plastics. This summer I bought a pack of the SS Hemp Wizards with Grateful Dead stealie stamps. Oh yiss.
The top 10 discs of each type
To get a little more chart action going, let’s take a look at the top 10 discs in each category.
Reddit’s Top 10 most discussed distance drivers
Hmmm…are people really feelin’ the Groove that much?
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| Speed | Glide | Turn | Fade | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innova Destroyer | 12 | 5 | -1 | 3 |
| Innova Boss | 13 | 5 | -1 | 3 |
| Innova Wraith | 11 | 5 | -1 | 3 |
| Innova Beast | 10 | 5 | -2 | 2 |
| Discraft Force | 12 | 5 | 0 | 3 |
| Innova Groove | 13 | 6 | -2 | 2 |
| Discraft Nuke | 13 | 5 | -1 | 3 |
| Discraft Avenger | 10 | 5 | 0 | 3 |
| Innova Monster | 10 | 3 | 0 | 5 |
| Innova Katana | 13 | 5 | -3 | 3 |
Reddit’s Top 10 most discussed fairway drivers
The River might be “mentioned” a little more than reality - but it is an excellent straight flying fairway driver!
| Speed | Glide | Turn | Fade | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innova Teebird | 7 | 5 | 0.0 | 2 |
| Innova Firebird | 9 | 3 | 0.0 | 4 |
| Latitude 64 River | 7 | 7 | -1.0 | 1 |
| Innova Valkyrie | 9 | 4 | -2.0 | 2 |
| Discraft Flick | 9 | 4 | 1.0 | 4 |
| MVP Amp | 8 | 5 | -1.5 | 1 |
| Latitude 64 Saint | 9 | 7 | -2.0 | 2 |
| Innova Sidewinder | 9 | 5 | -3.0 | 1 |
| Innova Roadrunner | 9 | 5 | -4.0 | 1 |
| Innova Thunderbird | 9 | 5 | 0.0 | 2 |
Reddit’s Top 10 most discussed midranges
I think you could just bag these discs and you would have a solid lineup! I love my Buzzz.
| Speed | Glide | Turn | Fade | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Discraft Buzzz | 5 | 4 | -1.0 | 1 |
| Discraft Zone | 4 | 3 | 0.0 | 3 |
| Innova Leopard | 6 | 5 | -2.0 | 1 |
| Innova Roc | 4 | 4 | 0.0 | 3 |
| Discraft Comet | 4 | 5 | -2.0 | 1 |
| Dynamic Discs Truth | 5 | 5 | 0.0 | 2 |
| Dynamic Discs Truth | 5 | 5 | -1.0 | 1 |
| Innova Gator | 5 | 2 | 0.0 | 4 |
| Dynamic Discs Justice | 5 | 1 | 0.5 | 4 |
| Discraft Drone | 5 | 4 | 0.0 | 4 |
| Innova Mako | 4 | 5 | 0.0 | 0 |
Reddit’s Top 10 most discussed putters
All solid putters here. Personally I putt with Wizards and throw a Gstar Aviar for soft approaches.
| Speed | Glide | Turn | Fade | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Innova Aviar | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| Latitude 64 Pure | 3 | 3 | -1 | 1 |
| Innova Nova | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 |
| Gateway Wizard | 2 | 3 | 0 | 2 |
| MVP Spin | 2 | 4 | -2 | 0 |
| Axiom Discs Envy | 3 | 3 | 0 | 2 |
| Dynamic Discs Judge | 2 | 4 | 0 | 1 |
| Discmania Link | 2 | 3 | 0 | 1 |
| Innova Dart | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 |
| Innova Rhyno | 2 | 1 | 0 | 3 |
Caveats
There are a few caveats to be aware of in this exercise - namely, I matched words in comments to a list of disc names.
So words like “truth” “river” and “spin” may be used frequently and not in reference to those specific discs - but given the reliability of discs like the Lat64 River, I feel pretty ok that the list mostly reflects reality.
There were a few words I manually excluded from the process (see details in code below) - for example, “birdie”. Although it’s possible people just love the deep deep pizza feel Innova’s Birdie putter, I thought it was more likely they were talking about throwing in below par.
Additionally, in order to match words reliably, I had to drop things like the “3” from Leopard3 (Roc3, Buzz OS, etc) because sometimes people write is as “Leopard3” and sometimes as “Leopard 3”. So the Roc may not actually be the most discussed disc and instead it may be some combination of Roc and Roc3. This probably also limits mentions of discs with simple letter-number combinations like discmania discs although they still show up in the full data table.
If you want to explore the full data table, which contains 351 mentioned discs, head over to the code walkthrough here.