Tesla: Integrated Circuit

I was recently looking back through some of the work we've compiled for Tesla seeking out common threads. Clearly our ideas influence one another, but if an idea keeps coming up it means one of two things: either it's a Melvin-y design challenge, or it hits on something endemic to human nature that we're anxious to experience.

I think combining artifacts with one another is the latter.

Given how long this project has been running, it should come as no surprise that we've churned out too many ideas to discuss. Nevertheless, I'm going to try to hit on each of the major areas we've explored and point out their unresolved challenges. Hopefully that synthesis of ideas will put us in a position to do this space justice.

DFC-BFMs

A lot of this exploration started back when Wobbles (Duncan) proposed Double-Faced Cards with backs that form a single card. 

This setup provides us with visceral emotional impact, but at considerable cost. In addition to the logistical issues with DFCs (complicating draft and requiring opaque sleeves/checklist cards), Mechs bring up all sorts of problems with moving multi-card permanents to other zones, Clone-ing, and circulating the right number of parts in draft and constructed.

But who's to say we need anything so crazy to feel like building our own machine?

Cogs

Cogs in their various incarnations avoided actually combining cards in favor of letting them mesh to give you more uses of their abilities.

The gameplay gives Johnnies the perfect opportunity to devise their own doomsday machines, but it comes at a high complexity cost. On top of the "CMC at common" issue, each common Cog needs to have an activated ability that doesn't impact the board so as not to cause undue board complexity. We can stretch that with sorcery-speed activations, but that fix just brings up one more templating nightmare.

In order to achieve the desired gameplay there need to be a lot of Cogs at low rarities, and moreover, most of them need to be playable. But in order to avoid repetitive gameplay we have to forego doing things like making one gain enough life to be worthwhile on its own. Maybe it's possible to find enough designs that meet all those criteria, but I'm skeptical.

Daisy Chain

Another similar option to grow the number of effects as you build a gizmo is triggering off a previous link tapping.

While this avoids much of the complexity inherent in Cogs, it comes with a host of issues all its own. Most glaringly, the cards don't do anything alone, or even together. They need to be combined with "normal" artifacts, but don't read that way as clearly as, say, Equipment. In theory we could give them their own tap activations, but there's no way all of that is going to fit comfortably at common, and even if it did, we'd have trouble making the cards feel cohesive.

Sweet Ride

One of the holy grails of Magic design is a mount and rider mechanic. We've yet to see a completely convincing execution, in part because it's so tricky to make two from cards that work alone merge into one cohesive whole. A vehicle mechanic skirts that issue because the vehicle itself isn't going anywhere unmanned, but in place of that challenge we need to figure out how to get multiple creatures aboard. 

Of course it doesn't really make sense for part of the boat to go and attack while the rest stays home, which leaves us searching for things in the Banding space. Wizards' most recent attempt, Soulbond, was still fraught with text length and complexity issues, but the "fighting together" space is worth exploring anyway. Solve that puzzle and we likely solve vehicles.

App Store

The final bit of space I want to discuss is directly adding one artifact's abilities on to another. On the surface, it sounds like exactly what we mean by making a machine out of parts.

But just how many abilities really offer any utility in this context? I'd much rather have four separate pieces of Trading Post in play than something I can only activate once per turn.

The above design by Inanimate solves that problem, but at the cost of the card doing nothing by itself. If we spent enough time thinking we could probably come up with some abilities that bridge the gap. But ones that do that while filling out common under NWO and actually making for fun gameplay? I doubt it. Please prove me wrong.

The Turning of the Gears

All of these proposals have glaring holes, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should leave them by the wayside. Please submit a tweak to a mechanic that addresses one of its issues or a new mechanic that lets players build a machine which is greater than the sum of its parts.