Tesla: Pick and Choose

Over the past few weeks we’ve done a lot of work to get Tesla rolling. We’ve run a playtest with a bunch of mechanics we designed and in addition to getting the testers’ thoughts we’ve discussed which we liked, and how they could be improved. Now it’s time to decide what we’re going to keep working with and what we should replace. These mechanics will almost undoubtedly change over the course of design (if they make it through at all), so rather than asking you to vote on a particular implementation, I’m asking you to choose space you’d like to continue to play around with. Below are a few examples of how to use that space as well as my own thoughts on how good a fit it is for Tesla. You can vote for any number of mechanics from zero to all of them, everything with at least 33% of the vote will stay in the file in some form, the rest will sit out for now.

That said, please hold these mechanics to a high standard. I have every confidence that we can come up with plenty more that are just as good if not better, and we’ll form a more cohesive set with fewer unrelated mechanics as starting points. With that, let’s take a look at our options.

Everything has more iterations to try, but if we kept pursuing all of those we’d never finish. We have to make the hard choices and kill our babies, even if there’s still a small chance they might lead to something good.

Cog/Cogwork

The basic idea here is to allow players to build something unique and greater than the sum of its parts.

Many of the implementations we’ve tossed around have issues with board and comprehension complexity, and those issues are certainly endemic to the space, but that doesn’t mean we can’t find an implementation that avoids them. The basic idea not only fits Tesla like a glove, it has the potential to be Johnny’s favorite mechanic of all time. I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like something we should keep looking into.

Transcend/Surpass

These mechanics are all about embracing technology (colorless mana) as a means towards self-improvement.

Transcend and its ilk offer a number of interesting deckbuilding and gameplay decisions about how much you’re willing to sacrifice to get the colorless bonus. On the other hand, it has the potential to create one-sided games when one player has spells turned on and the other doesn’t, and that’s on top of the one-sided games it creates by encouraging mana screw.

Yes, you can just treat colorless as another color when constructing your mana base and it will work out fine, but that’s not an intuitive way to view it and even some of us were getting too greedy in the playtests. Your average Magic player is going to have a harder time, so my recommendation is to scrap it.

Progress/Iteration

At their core these keywords are about improving your creatures as you accomplish ever greater things, as tracked by spending mana.

There are some questions as to whether players will intuitively grasp what constitutes a single payment versus multiple. If we can’t find an intuitive version the mechanic’s sunk, and there are some development issues already rearing their ugly heads (balancing creatures that start with low power requires very unappealing costing). All that said, this setup nails gameplay that feels like progress, especially when only working with spells, and when balanced it’s fun to boot.  I vote keep it.

Dominance/ Bully

These mechanics are about oppression of the masses by those who have more power.

Both of the mechanics we tried in this category play in pretty fun, interactive, and interesting ways, though they do have the potential to snowball. On the whole I’d say this is space worth exploring, just not in Tesla. Yes, we can weave these elements into the world, but they don’t get at the essential qualities of the set. If we end up wanting something for this sort of flavor I’ll certainly push to look at these again, but for now I recommend we leave them out.

Training/Refine

These mechanics hit at ideas of technological improvement the same way we do magic design: iteratively!

This sort of mechanic inevitably leads to less varied gameplay as players are encouraged to run more similar cards to power them up. That’s not a huge issue, and I could definitely see something of this kind winding up in a set, but I’ve yet to see a take that wows me. I’d say come back to these if one of them perfectly fills a need that our set develops, but I’ll hold my breath for something a bit more breathtaking.

Eureka/Innovate

These mechanics take the opposite tact by representing improvement with fresh ideas.

Mechanics like these are problematic in limited where they’re almost always on; all that additional text feels extraneous. Some might claim that the issue is outweighed by these cards’ ability to diversify decks: no more four-ofs. That’s true to an extent, but there’s a reason Vintage is the only tournament format with restricted cards. They don’t actually make for fun gameplay. Things get awfully swingy with decks full of individual bombs, and deck diversity can actually suffer because you can’t really build around a card without a lot of copies. You can claim that the tournament scene needs fewer four-ofs, but I’m inclined to disagree. If R&D thought so then the rules would only allow 3. As you may have gathered by this point, my vote is to leave these by the wayside.

Combine

Whatever the implementation, the Mech mechanic is about combining the unique capabilities of different cards into something greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a lot like Cog/Cogwork that way.

So why are we even considering them when we have alternatives that don’t require wonky rules, expensive printing, and extreme parasitism? Mechs have astounding emotional impact and at the end of the day we’re trying to create an experience. The arguments against Mechs are 100% valid, the question is just whether it’s worth putting up with all of that for something with this much potential. I can’t say for sure, but I can say that I’m going to keep voting to keep them around until I’m absolutely sure we can’t overcome their inherent issues.

Mine/Scrounge

These mechanics are about resource exploitation, drawing on the benefits of card filtering and the wasteful feeling of mill to capture the appropriate mood.

These cards hit a nice level of filtering and enable graveyard synergies without players having to intentionally pursue them. Did we beat Scry? Not quite, but we did our design aesthetic proud. This space is not so integral that we couldn't ditch it for a more perfect smoothing mechanic, but these certainly get my vote for at least one more round. After all, I’m in favor of Mecha and those mechanics demand some way to let players see a lot of extra cards looking for the right part. We can come up with a smoothing mechanic that lets you go deeper than Mine or Scrounge without becoming overpowered, but they’re near the top and the possibility is open that we’ll be constructing Mechs from the grave.

Price of Progress/Public Works

These mechanics let you risk a lot of little lives to get what you want on the cheap.

I like Price of Progress. A lot. In fact, it’s my favorite mechanic here. And that’s why I’m voting to excise it from the Tesla set file. It is not the job of the set to support a mechanic; it’s the job of each mechanic to support the set. With careful flavor management we could make Price of Progress fit into Tesla, but they’re not about the same thing. This mechanic deserves to be saved until it can really shine, say, representing a fanatical crusade.

So there you have it. Place your votes for whether to keep or ditch each mechanic here by next Tuesday and we’ll see how it all falls out.