Thursday, December 11, 2014

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.

21 comments:

  1. Invigorator Mk. I
    1
    Artifact - Common
    T: Target creature gains vigilance until end of turn. Then, you may sacrifice CARDNAME. If you do, search your library for a card named Invigorator Mk. II and put it onto the battlefield tapped.

    Invigorator Mk. II
    3
    Artifact - Uncommon
    T: Creatures you control gain vigilance until end of turn. Then, you may sacrifice CARDNAME. If you do, search your library for a card named Invigorator Mk. III and put it onto the battlefield tapped.

    Invigorator Mk. III
    5
    Artifact - Rare
    T: Put a +1/+1 counter on each attacking creature you control. Untap those creatures.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I get unduly turned off by mentioning cards by name, but Bogbrew Witch and friends show that the same is not true for players in general. Nevertheless, I'm not convinced this is a better implementation than some Level Up-esque version.

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    2. Invigorator
      1
      Artifact - Uncommon
      Level Up 2
      T: Target creature gains vigilance until end of turn.
      1-3 - T: Creatures you control gain vigilance until end of turn.
      4+ - T: Put a +1/+1 counter on each attacking creature you control. Untap those creatures.

      ?

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    3. Yeah, this is hard to fit in the current frame because the first box just has room for level up, but I'm confident the graphic design team could come up with something.

      Delete
  2. Moving Mecha out of creatures help a lot of power concerns. We still have to define how one Shatters a Circulating Forge, but nuking both cards no longer seems unreasonable.

    Are there enough possible inputs? We can tap (or not) and pay mana, pay life, discard, tap creatures, sack creatures, and a few weirder things. But if there's a vertical cycle that's just {3}{T} at common, {2}{T} at uncommon and {1}{T} at rare, that's going to be pretty boring.

    I'm not sure inputs have to be limited to activated abilities. We could put triggers there as well and that opens up a lot of options.

    That said, we still come back to the disconnect between cost and effect that I suspect will prove more troublesome than it sounds.

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    Replies
    1. Yeah, if one costs sacrificing a creature and another just wants you to tap one, there's going to need to be a huge disconnect on front-side costs to make both reasonable considerations. I'm not terribly optimistic about this setup, but I thought I ought to bring it up in case somebody has a brilliant solution.

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  3. Just about all of today's suggestions have so many lines of text I am, as a long veteran of the game, put off from reading them. Bestow, an incredibly grokkable concept, at the absolute tip top of the complexity scale, has four lines of reminder text.

    Many of today's ideas have four and five lines of reminder text, which is just a huge red flag, and I think it would be better to err on the side of saying that anything more than three lines of reminder text for a keyword at common is too many.

    Ditto what Jay says about the the number of different inputs. Also, I think the combination here that is given as the "simple example" is already broken, making two 1/1s every turn. (Icatian Crier did not make for fun games).

    Also, it feels like a huge waste to use DFCs on an artifact that flips the first time you use it.

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    Replies
    1. I agree that none of these are print-ready, but I probably should have spent more time lamenting the textiness. Anything we do in this space would need to be readable.

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    2. Perhaps this is my problem, but I need to see a printable template before I think it is worth seriously considering a mechanic. If that template doesn't exist, why get too deep in designing?

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    3. The intent here was not to print any of these. It was to present some ideas, say why they suck, and hope that gave someone an idea for how to adapt that basic idea to a workable form.

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  4. I think you're overestimating the problems with Power Source and Chain. As long as they aren't so dense that they get stranded in your hand regularly for several turns, that seems like a mostly good thing; it's a choice players can make. The thing to be careful of would be making too many commons where the right play was frequently to play it immediately (Gyroscope would fall in this category), since new players will usually hold on longer than they should.

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  5. I haven't been as active in this project as I would like, but: isn't *making a deck* assembling a bigger machine out of individual components? I'm not sure that the mechanics have to directly represent little cogs and sprockets in order to create the feeling of "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You can certainly argue that it is, yes. I enjoy assembling multi-part combos of Magic cards, probably for similar reasons that I enjoy assembling multi-part wacky machines in steampunk board games or card games that aren't Magic.

      But that means that deckbuilding for most sets is already somewhere in this space. Since creating machines is such a resonant trope, we'd like to find a mechanical implementation that lets players do that in a way that normal deckbuilding doesn't. So we have to go beyond what Magic normally offers.

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    2. Your deck as your machine may be a fun metaphor to chase if we give players tools both to affect how their deck plays out and that depend more than usual on that order. Like scry and miracle or clash and kinship or dig and feed the machine.

      Not thrilled with these, but here's something new along these lines:

      Hunt Artifacts (exile cards from the top of your deck until you exile an artifact card. Put it back on top.)

      Maintain (at the end of your turn, if no artifacts have etb'd, and you haven't sacrificed any, sacrifice any artifact.)

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    3. The idea of the library is too basic. The metaphor might work for a brand new player, but it won't click for most of the established players who already have a concept of what that stack of cards represents.

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  6. Of these, I think Cogwork has the most promise.

    Automated Shredder (C)
    2
    Artifact
    Cogwork
    1, T: Target player puts the top card of his or her library into his or her graveyard.

    Smoothie Blender (C)
    3
    Artifact
    Cogwork
    T: Gain 1 life.

    Stalwart Guard (C)
    3
    Artifact Creature - Construct
    Cogwork
    2/3

    Sport Utility Golem (U)
    4
    Artifact Creature - Juggernaut
    Cogwork
    CARDNAME attacks each turn if able.
    CARDNAME doesn't untap during your untap step.
    5/5

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Unfortunately, I think Cogwork has some development issues where you need an effect that is exciting (because you want people to put the card in their deck) and then not broken when you double it.

      Your first two proposals are pretty unexciting, even if you do double it. Automated Shredder is as good as Millstone (an unplayable card) as long as you jump through the hoop of playing an artifact every turn, otherwise it is worse.

      Smoothie Blender is in the "repeatable life gain" spot which is a bad spot for development, because gaining 1 life every turn is nothing (pretty much unplayable) but consistently gaining 2 life per turn can be dangerous. This splits the difference, so the power level is in the right place, but it is so boring.

      I would generally want to avoid mana payments on my Cogwork card abilities, because it makes it hard to use them after playing an artifact, and especially makes it hard to use multiple of them, which undermines this as a draft archetype.

      With this mechanic I feel a bit like if I push at it, and try to make it work, I'm going to end up at the Embersmith cycle ability (which is not a bad place to be, I think those cards were great).

      As far as consistency goes, I don't love putting this ability on creatures and non-creatures, because "giving something vigilance" and "allowing you to use it a second time" are such disparate ideas. I do like Sport Utility Golem for that reason, it feels more like the regular Cogwork.

      It actually makes me wonder if all Cogwork things want to untap only when an artifact ETBs, because that allows for a lot more exciting effects.

      Delete
    2. Good eye.

      Automated Shredder {2}
      Artifact
      Cog (~ doesn't untap during your untap step. Whenever another artifact ETB under your control, untap ~.)
      T: Target player puts the top four cards of his or her library into his or her graveyard.

      Smoothie Blender {3}
      Artifact
      Cog (~ doesn't untap during your untap step. Whenever another artifact ETB under your control, untap ~.)
      T: Gain 3 life.

      If it were just non-creature artifacts, we could replace the tapping with triggers, but with creatures in the mix this works better. Plus it makes these more fun with Voltaic Key.

      Stalwart Guard {2}
      Artifact Creature - Construct
      Cog (~ doesn't untap during your untap step. Whenever another artifact ETB under your control, untap ~.)
      2/3

      Sport Utility Golem {4}
      Artifact Creature - Juggernaut
      Cog (~ doesn't untap during your untap step. Whenever another artifact ETB under your control, untap ~.)
      CARDNAME attacks each turn if able.
      5/5

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    3. I really like that idea. Not only can we scale up weak effects, we can use splashier ones: card draw, removal, pump, etc that would be too oppressive otherwise.

      Delete
    4. At the cost of reading worse to players, this opens up a whole lot of space. And as for making it distinct from triggers on non-creatures: it plays out quite differently with abilities that cost mana, abilities that are better during combat or on an opponents turn, and high rarity cards with multiple abilities. I'm happy to give this a go (and certainly want to give at least blue a common or two which can untap these without artifact assistance).

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    5. I agree this fixes a lot of the problems with the original Cogwork, particularly allowing us to add mana costs and opening up the timing, because there is no pressure to use the artifact the same turn you untap it.

      I suspect we want to aim the very best cards with this mechanic at being playable in the 20th card range if you have no other artifacts, both to encourage people to draft them and then maybe think "hmm... I should draft more artifacts" and to stop the player drafting the cogwork deck from just getting everything awesome.

      I do think this mechanic is going to have the issue that a lot of the cards are going to be better than they look, but I think we can fight that partially by putting high activation costs on the abilities which will make the cards look better.

      Delete