I was asked a question in one of the comments on our YouTube which I thought would make for a good article. This is the second time a specific question or comment inspired an article and if you ever have a question be sure to ask and if its something I think will be helpful to the community I will write about it. Here was the question:

Nick.. What is your theory behind when to use or not use the Nightsister ability? I notice a couple of times during the game when I would have pinged the sister to reroll his big dice, you didn’t. There was one time when he was out of cards and on 3 damage on the Heirloom.

I went back and looked at the video and realized that there was a situation that was incredibly complex although I couldn’t find a time where my opponent had no cards in hand and was showing a 3. Perhaps it was in a previous video since it was a best of three match and the comment came on the third video. In those kinds of situations it’s usually correct to use Nightsister’s Action Ability (I’ll refer to it as a ping for the rest of this article) on such a high value die but the following situation is way harder to assess.

You can see the whole video here if you are curious to see how it all turned out.

When thinking about the Nightsister ability I generally think of it in a few different ways. First I like to think about best case scenarios vs worst case scenarios. Here the best case is blanking a 3 which saves 2 damage and the one damage is to Nightsister who is not the primary target. That’s great! Worst case they re-roll into a 3 and you took one damage for no reason, that obviously stinks.

Next I think about expected value of an average roll which in this case is 1 damage for the Heirloom (add up all the sides of damage and divide by 6, the Heirloom has an expected damage value of 1). By re-rolling a three you will be saving 1 damage on average but will be moving one damage over to Nightsister which is great in this situation because she isn’t the primary target. All of this makes us want to re-roll the die.

The problem is that these numbers, while positive, aren’t ultimate. Our opponent has four cards in hand to re-roll and since their other dice rolled poorly they certainly will be re-rolling since the incentive is so high. Usually, they will be re-rolling any situation where they hit anything that is a 1 or worse so in many situation you are just doing random damage to Nightsister with no profit. In general, I don’t like using Nightsister when my opponent has that many cards in their hand.

Another thing to consider are the number and type of actions that will occur around a potential ping. Once you ping your opponent will get the next action. If I decide to ping my opponent’s next action might be to roll out Anakin, I’ll roll out Aphra and then they will re-roll a bunch of dice if they didn’t hit lethal damage to kill Aphra. This could lead Aphra to die before she resolves anything meaningful. Instead of pinging my next action was to roll out Aphra in order get value from her dice – ideally grabbing some shields. Even if I don’t hit anything off of Aphra’s dice right away I can still set myself up for a reroll of those dice if I have enough actions to get value from them.

The countdown of actions also made me consider Kylo’s Stafighter because if I were to hit the special I want to them to have as many blue cards in hand as possible. In this situation using the ping might have made a potential Kylo’s Starfighter activation worse since it gets me down an action and they can get cards out of hand faster.

By keeping the three melee out there it might make them use it right away because they fear the ping. Aphra can take three in that spot since it isn’t a breaking point for her and taking that damage does have value. As expected my opponent’s next action was to resolve the three. This gets us an action ahead in order to resolve a potential Starfighter special and potential Aphra reroll value. The forced resolution can also mess up potential modifier damage from Shoto Lightsaber since they will have one less die with a base melee side.

My hand in this spot was completely non-interactive with their dice. If I did have something that would have made the situation different. Had I had a Flank I snap it off and get rid of the 3 side. If I had an Overconfidence I would have waited for Anakin to roll in. Since I had nothing interactive I had to maximize my dice value. I felt there was a really good chance that Aphra was going to die that turn and I wanted to get as much as I could from her before she went down, getting her dice in the pool and planning for rerolls was the best way to interact, not using the ping.

Please let me know if you have any questions regarding this since I’ll admit it isn’t the easiest thing to read or write. Below I linked a Vlog by HonestlySarcastc that talks in depth about Nightsister in the context of BrOTK. I time stamped it to when he starts talking about Nightsister since the stuff before was about BrOTK but feel free to watch all of it if you are interested in playing BrOTK since it’s very helpful for that.

Thanks for reading, watching and as always…

May the rolls be with You…

-NJCuenca

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