Tesla: Momma Didn't Raise No Rube

A couple weeks back our Tesla discussion turned towards ways for players to build their own machines. We got a few ideas there and started by exploring sharing abilities directly.

But I don't think that's our best approach. Let's take a look at what I believe to be some more promising directions.

Get in Gear

We've been talking about variants of the Cog mechanic for quite a while.

It reads simply, but just a few Cogs can lead to a huge number of possible lines. That's great for Johnny to figure out something cool, but means the mechanic is going to cause a lot of board complexity, and not just for its controller. Common artifacts would need to work under NWO anyway, so your opponents can avoid worrying about them to some extent, but even one complex higher rarity artifact can lead to each of your Cogs adding a lot more board complexity since they might untap it. On top of that, we still have the CMC under NWO issue to contend with.

But as with any mechanical space we've considered for this long, artisans have come up with numerous other options. Our last Tesla Playtest used Power Source:

We forego any talk of converted mana cost and it's significantly easier to track what can untap what, but at the cost of being locked into your initial choice.

As it is, Power Source makes players want to hold the cards its on until they have something to power them. That should set off alarm bells in our heads: Magic is fun when things are happening, but most players don't enjoy sitting around with nothing going on. That's why we'll never see Stasis again and it means we need to be wary of mechanics that reward waiting over taking action. So how can we make players comfortable casting these cards on any board?

Chain won't turn on immediately like Power Source, but that means that players won't be stuck holding their Chain cards waiting to draw the appropriate artifact first...Of course, they may be holding a cheap artifact in hand waiting to draw a Chain card, so we haven't fully avoided the issue of keeping players from casting spells. We've also seen a simpler alternative proposed:

Cogwork is easy to track and understand, but loses a lot of the "build it yourself" allure when the possibilities trace out so linearly. Moreover, Cogwork still suffers from the problems of encouraging players to hold off on spellcasting. We could try something with a template closer to Soulbond, but that confused a lot of players. Overall, there are appealing aspects to the untapping paradigm, but we'd be remiss not to consider alternatives.

Reinventing the Wheel

Reinvent takes notes from Bloodbraid Elf and Birthing Pod. Timmy can take a spin and see how things develop, while Johnny can carefully engineer a chain of effects that are more than the sum of their parts. For instance, one could imagine going from a Reinvent artifact that made some tokens to one that makes each player sacrifice a creature and finally to some more expensive artifact that can revive a creature from an opponent's graveyard.

There are, of course, repetitive gameplay concerns to contend with, and we'd have to be extra careful to make it easy for players to get an artifact at every cost for limited. One solution is to make the trigger optional, though that makes an already texty ability longer and would require more clicks on MTGO.

Our last consideration for today is a little bit more out there:

We've discussed Mecha at length, but they're not the only use for combining Double-Faced cards. Using Nicholas Grayson's card spanning text idea, we could allow players to create their own activated abilities. Of course, we'd need to find enough simple abilities that fit within the constraints of New World Order, have a clear cost counterpart, and can be balanced so that the various configurations are similar power levels. That's a tall order.

Ultimately none of these implementations is quite ready for print. This is a tough nut to crack, but the rewards are there. So why don't you take a crack at it? Show us what sorts of cards one of these mechanics needs to work, tweak something to address its flaws, or design a mechanic that lets players build their own machines from whole cloth.