It’s winter break for us, but in an effort to review subjects that are important to the game, we’ll be reposting some of our greatest hits (articles). So this was the article that started it all for us. NJCuenca wanted to let people know that they should use more math when rolling dice and look where we’ve ended up. I think its been a long enough time that we should definitely go over this with our new found understanding after all this time playing, but we’ll leave that for another day. Far too often do i see people still not taking probability into account and then wondering what went wrong.

Greetings Padawans and Jedi Knights alike. My name is Nick Cuenca. I’ve been playing CCGs for almost twenty years to moderate success. Today I’m going to write about a topic that is essential to becoming a better Star Wars Destiny player: probability.

People are naturally bad at understanding probability and are generally risk averse. This includes myself of course. As tedious as it is I figured it behooved me to relearn some of the basics.

I was inspired to write about this topic by this particular moment in this video. For those unable to watch: The JangoVeers villain player (I’ll refer to him as Villain) has 4 cards in hand and is showing two +2 range damage sides(one is a Veers and the other is a Holdout Blaster die). He needs a range base damage in order to complete his massive damage turn. He picks up 3 dice (two Jango and one Veers) to re roll and try to hit a base damage side. He hits a range base side on Veers! Was this right? Since both Veers and Jango have two range base damage sides intuitively you’d think it would be but lets do the math to be sure. There are a total of 216 combinations when rolling 3 six sided dice. Each die has two sides that hit which is 2/6. From my experience its easier to get this answer by calculating failure and then subtracting 1 from it. The formula looks like this:

Px= 1- p(fail to hit range base)= 1- (4/6)(4/6)(4/6)= .704…

This was a great decision 71 percent to hit is pretty good.

After our villain makes his dice his opponent has a well timed Electroshock which takes away his base damage, DARN! Our villain with 3 cards in hand decides to discard to re roll the two Jango dice that missed the first time and hits with Jango! Was this a good decision? Let’s take a look using the same method.

Py= 1- p(fail to hit range base range damage)= 1- (4/6)(4/6)= .555…

55 percent is only slightly above a coin flip. Let’s just say for devil’s advocate sake he decided to re-roll the Veers dice. He has 1 side that is a push while two sides are arguably better for our villain (hitting a 1 is fine since it lets you revolve the +2 side on the Holdout Blaster which I count as a positive). This is the same probability as our first roll.

Pz= 1- p(fail to hit base range damage)= 1- (4/6)(4/6)(4/6)= .704…

This is much better than 55%. I’d argue that re rolling the Veers dice is the decision that is best and the one I would have made.

For the sake of fairness I will say that I haven’t accounted for the idea that our Villain has already decided that he will continue with re-rolls until he has exhausted his re-roll chances. In this case you would apply the formula to the number of total dice in the re-rolls. Since he has three cards left in the first example and two in the second this will definitely change the math for the positive. This works both ways, however, and if he had decided to re-roll in the manner I suggested that would have increased his percentages even more. If he decides to re-roll twice with two dice that’s a total of 4 dice compared to re-rolling 3 dice twice which is 6 dice. That’s a huge difference!

This is important to note because you might want to aggressively discard cards or be more conservative because you want to keep cards for later in or for the next turn. Context matters a lot when talking about which dice to re-roll. In this particular exampleLuke Skywalker has 5 damage on him. If our villain hits a total 7 or more damage it will kill Luke. There are only five possibilities out of 216 that kill Luke: he can hit 2 base Range/2 base Range, 1 base Range/2 base Range 2 base Range/1 base range, 2 base range/1 base Melee and 1 base melee/2 base range. I usually air on the side of caution when deciding on re-rolls. In this scenario Luke’s break point is so high that introducing a third die to the equation is well worth it especially since our Villain is so ahead. Sometimes being too cautious might be the wrong move but in this scenario being conservative would have been my play.

I hope you have enjoyed this entry. If I messed up the math please inform me and I will do what I can to adjust it. I hope we can all grow with our understanding of this game and make the best decisions possible given the context. If you liked this little write up follow me on Twitter to get notices when I publish something else. I’ll be posting decks on YouTube soon and you’ll get updates on that too. Thanks for reading.

Nicolas Javier Cuenca

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Twitter: @njcuenca

Instagram: @njcuenca

There really isn’t much to add to this, but this math is much more indicative of a Rainbow No 5 deck at this stage of the game, but you can often see things like this with Shoto or Ancient Lightsaber showing big modified sides in R2P2. If you’re planning to take down your Store Champs, Regionals, etc then it is in your best interest to learn the math behind probability and what can be expected.

~HonestlySarcastc