Card Text/Abilities[]
Before you would be dealt a faceup Ship damage card, you may spend 1 
to discard it instead.
- Charges: 2
Deckbuilding[]
- Belbullab-22
Availability[]
Notes[]
- Discarding the damage card instead of being dealt it prevents all effects of that card. Some examples of cards that are very nice to avoid include Direct Hit, Weapons Failure, and Damaged Engine, but nearly all the ship crits are harmful to a Belbullab.
- Discarding the damage card also effectively reduces the damage to your ship, since that card is not on your ship anymore and not counting against its hull. In other words, this card lets you prevent up to two damage to your Belbullab! However, that depends on actually suffering crits and drawing ship cards.
- Of the 33 damage cards, 25 are Ship cards: any faceup card you receive has about a ~76% chance of being a ship card.
- I'll Show You The Dark Side of course bypasses this by only dealing a pilot card of the opposing player's choice.
- Your odds of a ship card grow or shrink as cards are dealt from the damage deck. Faceup cards and the discard pile are public information which you can review, which can be useful. If, for example, the crits on your ships and in the discard pile are mostly pilot cards, you have a better chance moving forward of drawing more ship cards.
- Each die has a 12.5% chance of rolling a crit (one in 8 rolls on average; dice variation swings this wildly from game to game, of course). Your expected suffered crit % (as a percent of damage suffered) raises further because they are cancelled last, and are the most likely to get past your evade results. To make things even trickier, the number of crits you can expect to suffer in a round varies not just on odds and dice variance, but also on your opponent. A TIE Advanced/x1 or Vulture swarm with Energy-Shell Charges, for example, can be expected to deal crits quite regularly. When high-crit fleets are popular, this card increases in value.
- Crits dealt to your shields don't matter for this card, and a standard belbullab has only 3 hull. Soulless One gets the best use out of this card thanks to its 5 hull.
- Because you don't know how many ship crits (and which ones) to expect in the future, shedding the damage whenever able is generally a good plan (instead of waiting for future crits that may not come).
- Keeping a Damaged Sensor Array in hopes of later discarding something more serious like Direct Hit could be a good idea, but you might not draw another faceup damage card afterwords (and miss out on simply preventing one damage).
- Here's an example of a funny strategic dead end: Allowing Hull Breach through would guarantee future damage cards are dealt faceup, so that you have a high chance to shed the next two damage with this card. However, each has a ~24% chance of being a pilot card instead. Even if both are ship cards, on balance you're only shedding one additional card (since you let hull breach through instead of preventing that one damage), all at the great risk of whatever comes later thanks to Hull Breach.