The variola simulations with intermediate to high-quality draft (that is, a low error rate, approximating what one might observe with 8· coverage) target and/or NN genomes deliver virtually the same results as finished genomes. Considering that it costs approximately three times as much to generate finished sequence as it does draft, our analyses indicate that investing in more high-quality draft target genomes is better than investing in fewer finished genomes. For our analyses, only one target strain must be finished, and the remaining target sequences and all the NNs may be provided as draft.