Tesla Design Challenge: Designing Mecha Cards

As I mentioned in the Roadmap for Tesla Design, we will be test-drafting Tesla, using a mockup set inserting the Mecha cards into Mirrodin Besieged.

Here are the cards that Havelock designed for our previous tests. They take great pains to reduce complexity, and I think they're very elegant.

(Any of the Heads can join with any of the Bodies. We haven't figured out the art layout of the joined cards, so all the Mech cards in the test file will use the same backside art for now.)

The Challenge
In the next playtest, we will test colored Mechas. Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to design a cycle of Common Mecha Heads and Bodies for each color as well as a colorless Common Head and Body. 

If you want to, you can modify how the mechanic works; ask me in the comments if you're not sure.

Criteria: Ease of Mental Processing
One of the key things we're looking for is that the P/T patterns and abilities are easy to process mentally. As you can see in the cards above, Havelock set some guidelines for his cards that make it easy to intuitively remember the size of the flip side. Even though Mecha is potentially an uber-complex mechanic, during our previous playtests it wasn't mentally taxing at all.

So look at the cards above, make observations about what Havelock did, ...and then if you have ideas for your own scheme, go ahead and use it. There have been some good ideas mentioned already. Some of the patterns you see, such as matching costs, might not be necessary. But there is nothing wrong with adopting the current system either. Overall, keep it at Common.

Criteria: Synergy
The second key is that the cards create an interesting web of synergy. Each combination should feel like a different creature with different benefits. Take the lifelink-granting Head in the cards above. 4/7 lifelink, 7/4 lifelink, 6/6 lifelink, and 4/4 flying lifelink each have their advantages. For each ability, there seems to be an optimal combination you hope to get, such as 4/4 flying lifelink, but at the same time you can see situations where other combinations would be useful.

Although Havelock chose to make the Bodies mostly vanilla for low complexity, relying only on Power and Toughness stats to define their characteristics, he managed to pick abilities for the Heads such as "1: Get +1/-1 until end of turn" that has a different meaning depending on the Power and Toughness of the Body it's put on.

These Common cards probably need to be limited to very simple abilities, with a large portion of them being just keywords. Feel free to employ any of the keywords used above as well as your own. It's not about coming up with novel abilities — the transform-and-join part is novel and complex enough already. The real challenge is how to make the set of 6 x 6 pieces intertwine and form combinations in interesting ways. That said, if you have a weird but awesome idea that seems fitting at Common, don't be afraid to use it either.

Criteria: Power Level
One thing about the power level — during previous playtests, it felt as if the power level of the front side could be a little stronger. We still need to figure this out, but for this test, we would like to try out making the Mecha cards good on their own, especially the colored ones. So use the power level of the common Slivers in M14 as a guide, and put the Mechas at a level where their front side is not great, but you don't feel bad about having them in your deck either even if they don't transform.

Bonus Challenge
Many readers probably have ideas for different abilities and takes that Mechas could have at a higher rarity. Also, some readers may have the ideas but not the time for a full double Common cycle.

So, feel free to submit any one-off designs for any of the other rarities as well. We intend to have 5 of each color + 2 Colorless for Uncommon, and 5 of each color + 1 Colorless for Rare in this test. You could make a whole cycle if you want, but you don't have to. I will choose the Uncommons and Rares to put into the test set (this test will be Mythic-less though), and I'll also put all of them in a thread on the wiki so that we can refer to them as we move forward.

Deadline
Please post your ideas in the comment section below before the end of Monday, August 6.