Tesla Horizons: Graveyard Shift

As we continue exploratory design for Tesla we'll be looking at all of our options for mechanically representing Tesla's progress theme (as discussed here). Each piece will examine what a few of the possible implementations might do to the surrounding set.

The first post looked at cards that improved themselves, tracking progress with the battlefield, and explicitly counting progress counters.

The second post investigated using lands and mana to track how far you've progressed.

Today we'll see if we can track progress using the graveyard rather than the battlefield.

Body Count

The most straightforward option is just to look at the graveyard as it is, most likely counting some subset of cards in it.

We could just as well use some sort of three-tiered Threshold variant, but whichever way we go there are a number of similar effects on the environment.

• Players have to track what's in the graveyard.
• There's lenticular complexity in players trying to get their own cards into the graveyard.
• The number will almost always increase over time.
• We get the flavor of incorporating elements of what came before into new innovations.
• It gives the set a grungier feel. We're not going to hit "the golden age" by looking at graveyards.
• We'll need more death than usual. Two major candidates are sacrificing artifacts and self-mill.

But there's no reason we need to regard the graveyard as a static resource. After all, the whole point is that it grows as the game goes on.

Dying Off

Repurpose doesn't mirror technological progress quite as closely since creatures with the ability that come down later won't get access to the old triggers, but I think the analogy is still plenty strong to hit the note we want. By far the biggest upside is cutting down on the complexity of tracking graveyards. Once something's dead players are free to ignore it completely. The other side of the coin is that the progress is perhaps too easy to reset.

Pushing Up Daisies

Salvage goes the other way and uses what's already in the graveyard as a resource. There may be something to play around with in this space, but I don't think this is it. I posted an uncommon because commons should probably stick to one-shot triggers to keep board complexity down and at that point it doesn't feel much like making progress.

Some of these concerns could be addressed by designing the mechanic more linearly and having cards care about anything that you've salvaged rather than just what they nabbed themselves. Then it's not as easy to undo as Repurpose and even simple commons that aren't improving themselves can still feel like they're building toward something larger. Something like this:

Cost You Your Life

But ultimately, even without any fancy zone changing we can do more with cards in the graveyard than just count them. We've already looked at Experience, and as Jade Phoenix suggested, we can use what's made its way into the graveyard as a barometer for how long the game has gone.

This version of progress precludes too much self-mill or discard in the limited environment if it's going to do exciting things with higher CMCs. I personally like death triggers here because they both avoid feel bad moments when the card gives you a progress effect for less than its own cost and gives players a baseline on which to evaluate the cards.

Keep Digging

Now it's your turn. How can we best track progress with the graveyard? What else should slot into a set that's using this approach? How else can we use this space?