Tesla: Breaking the Mould

It's been a while since I actually managed to get anything written about Tesla. A few weeks back we were looking for a different way to care about artifacts.

I'm not going to discuss every solution you offered here; you can read the comments for that. What I will do is cover some areas you proposed and discuss their merits and challenges.

Easy as Pie

AlexC proposed taking a step back and instead of focusing on artifacts, looking at colorless cards more generally.

In order to justify this level of comprehension complexity, the mechanic would need to hit more than just artifacts and lands, though those could certainly account for the bulk of the interaction. Clearly it plays nicely with Eldrazi, but also with Morph, some type of token we make colorless because every color makes them, or Ghostfire (which may well be preempted by Khans of Tarkir block). The idea doesn't really work with colored Mechs either, but if we forego that approach it's a nice way to support an artifact-heavy environment that creates different decks from those we've seen before.

Untapped Potential

The first suggestion took its cues from the more linear artifact mechanics Magic has seen thus far. It took us one step beyond the obvious in asking what artifacts are. The next area comes from asking another question: what do artifacts do?

As we discussed a week ago, there's not exactly a clear answer.

Are they colorless? We have Onyx Goblet. Do they tap? Just ask Carnage Altar. Then perhaps they have activated abilities. Obelisk of Urd. Or continuous impact on the board: Kaleidostone. Nevertheless, most artifacts have most of those qualities and it's not crazy to try to play into them. We could look for activations:

Tapping:

Or a combination of the two:

These mechanics are not without their challenges. It's not easy to make multiple Glue cards that you want to stick together, but still offer some incentive to cast them normally. Charged cards feel like they're getting worse. Artifactbond is every bit as texty and rules-intensive as Soulbond. Chain doesn't quite capture the Rube Goldberg feel it's going for. And Empowered shifts too abruptly in power level with each subsequent tapping artifact. Some of those we might be able to work with, while others are death knells, but all of them could use at another round of iteration before we move on.

Because I Said So

But an artifact mechanic can offer different incentives than Affinity and Metalcraft without needing to uncover some great truth about artifacts in general. It can just say it cares about artifacts.

Scrap comes from a long tradition of red "helping" artifacts, but it reads poorly to LSPs. Then again, less punishing versions tend to be more complex.

Of course those mechanics still push you towards jamming Memnites and Ornithopters into a deck. We could easily skew the opposite direction.

While we're at it, we could even address an underlying issue with artifact blocks: strong colorless cards end up as 4-ofs in every deck.

Jay Treat has even proposed we go really out there and forget putting artifacts in our decks altogether.

Again, we have work to do. Imbue makes awfully wordy commons. Prominence demands that we agree on a solution to the Converted Mana Cost problem in order to appear at common. Invent adds a bunch of text that rarely matters in limited and affects constructed deckbuilding, but rarely gameplay. Cobble confuses players about what they can and cannot get at home vs. at FNM.

None of this is meant to preclude any of the mechanics here. In fact, I like a lot of them quite well. But even if we use one of them as is we'll need to be cognizant of their weak points, and if we continue iterating these shortcomings are good places to focus our tweaking. For this week please design commons with mechanics that play well in a block filled with artifacts. The featured mechanics can be ones we've already discussed, tweaks to those, or brand new. In true Tesla spirit: let's get tinkering!