Tesla: Welcome to Kaladesh - Great Expectations

This article is WotC safe.

Last week and the week before, we discussed possibly having Tesla set on Kaladesh, a new plane which debuted in Magic Origins. The discussion began with some great debate on both sides, but over the course of the last week, it seems there was an overall shift towards supporting Kaladesh. The setting seems full of rich inspiration for design even with the sparse details Origins gave us, and the conversations and proposals being thrown around in the comments were promising. For these reasons, it's time I've made my executive decision as the project lead of Tesla. So, without further ado, welcome to the plane of Tesla: Kaladesh!

This week, let's continue going through the final stages of exploratory design, onto one of the big topics I've been planning to discuss, and that our arrival at Kaladesh serves as a great segue to: expectations.

Art by Noah Bradley

Tesla, since almost the very beginning, has been greatly guided by its inspirations and genre; much of the work we've done, and the visions we have for Tesla, are directed towards fulfilling the expectations players would have for the 'steampunk' set, an expectation which leads to yet more expectations. With Tesla as the steampunk set, people naturally began to expect Tesla to be about artifacts... but also expect it to not be a rehash of Mirrodin, the previous artifact set. Finally, any set working by the principles of the modern age of Magic design has many expectations just by nature of being your standard Magic set. Does it have a creature mechanic? A noncreature mechanic? What are its themes, and are they present at common? And now that Tesla is set on Kaladesh, even more expectations enter the fold... yeesh! So many expectations!

While managing all these expectations can be frustrating, it's also one of the best sources of inspiration a designer can have. Today, I'd like to talk about some of the big expectations that Tesla will have to rise up to. We'll be discussing the difficulties these expectations may cause, but also the benefits they give us. Now, onto the expectations themselves!

Expectation: Tesla is a contemporary large set.

This first one brings a lot of expectations to the table. If we're making a large set by the principles set by current Magic design, it's going to have 249 cards, an equal number of cards in each color (approx.), a robust Limited format, and so on. Many of these expectations are so prevalent in amateur Magic design that they're barely felt at this point, but they're still actual expectations that we have to surpass.

Expectation: Tesla will have the usual suite of mechanics.

Now, what do I mean when I say the 'usual suite'? Well, all Magic sets nowadays feature new keywords and ability words, alongside one or two returning keywords and ability words - so we're going to have to not only find one or two mechanics to bring back, but also design new mechanics for Tesla. These mechanics will have to represent the story of the set, both flavorfully and experientially. They should appear at all levels of play, and they should synergize with each other in many ways.

Importantly, there's a certain 'suite' of mechanics that shows up frequently. In the last half-dozen or so large Magic sets, you often see most of the following: a creature mechanic (Outlast), a combat mechanic (Prowess), a noncreature mechanic (Rebound), a smoothing mechanic (Morph). Of course, one mechanic can fulfill multiple roles. If we look to Magic Origins, a set with only two new mechanics, we can see it hit every note! Renown is a creature/combat mechanic, Spell Mastery is a noncreature mechanic, and Scry (now evergreen in order to be a perpetual role-filler) is a smoothing mechanic.

'Smoothing' mechanics deserve an especial mention. They have often 'smoothed' your draws (Cycling, Scry), plays (Morph), or mana (Landcycling). However, we've seen some unique forms of 'smoothing' as well. For example, in Theros, Bestow fulfilled a 'smoothing' role (alongside Scry) by fulfilling multiple roles in the decks of the format, allowing games to play more smoothly.

These are some of the biggest expectations that Tesla will have, even if they won't impact our design much, since we've designed with them in mind for so long, that they hardly feel like expectations. So, not much negative here, but there's a lot of positives! We now have a checklist of mechanics that we want to fulfill, with a checklist of goals we want them to achieve. That's a great start!

Expectation: Tesla is a steampunk set.

Okay, so what does 'steampunk' even mean? I talked about the expectations of a steampunk set in The Dish on Kaladesh, but it was pretty brief. Let's go over them again, but this time with far more detail, and with some discussion on how Kaladesh will help us meet these expectations.

"Tesla has to feature a classist conflict of some sort..."

Okay, so I exaggerated when I said earlier that it has to feature a classist conflict of some sort. Many stories that people would call 'steampunk' - including the original stories, surprisingly - don't feature any of the usual "punk" themes that "cyberpunk" was named after. These "punk" elements were all about streetwise and alienated youths who were rebellious to the Establishment. There was The Man, and then there was you. 

Connecting this to the historical basis for steampunk is trivial - the Industrial Revolution has its parallel to The Man in its Robber Barons, who exploited everything they could to amass their wealth, including - especially - the people.

Kaladesh captures this aspect perfectly. Chandra's origin story, Fire Logic, features many characters who rebel against the consul to protect a child from being executed for being a natural mage, and The Worlds of Magic Origins goes out of its way to note that "the free spirits among the artificers, however, sometimes run afoul of the law." The Man is represented well, too: "the consul's forces and works are nearly omnipresent", and "consuls control the flow of Æther". Kaladesh seems deliberately built to capture these expectations, which is unsurprising.

Note that we don't have to address these themes with a steampunk set, since many steampunk stories don't bother to, I think it's important to stay true to the genre's roots, and to its historical inspiration, hence why I consider this a high priority. But if we find that the set's needs don't accommodate this expectation, then it's easily discarded.

"Tesla has to have the highest level of technology in all of Magic's multiverse..."

When people think 'steampunk', they immediately think of antiquated technology pushed to its limits to replicate surprisingly modern - or even futuristic! - technologies. Now, in our universe, steampunk is adorably outdated. However, in the universe of Magic the Gathering, steampunk is light-years beyond almost every plane (except for the dedicated scientists of the Izzet League on Ravnica). If we're to meet this expectation, our set has to emphasize its higher level of technology, and it has to showcase the characteristic 'antiquated look' of steampunk.

Now, one big expectation that I previously didn't discuss was the kind of technology that steampunk uses. The Industrial Revolution - the largest inspiration for steampunk - powered its steam engines with coal, and lead to intense levels of smog and pollution throughout the industrialized world. Though not all steampunk stories are dystopian or dark, almost all of them address the price one must pay for steampower, in one way or another. The technology has a price, and often, the price is paid for with exploitation of people, resources, the law, and so on. But in a Magic steampunk set - or any other 'gaslamp fantasy' setting - there are some more supernatural prices one can pay...

"It has to combine technology and magic in some interesting way."

So, one thing that Magic does with its top-down sets is take one genre and mash it up with Magic's unique fantasy-feel, producing its own spin on the genre. Innistrad was based on Gothic horror, but featured a lot more magic than you'd see in, for example, Bram Stoker's Dracula or Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Likewise, Tesla will be expected to put its own spin on the steampunk genre, and will be expected to do so with magic.

This is where the expectation that "the technology has a price" comes into play in a big way. You see, in fantasy, magic often has a nasty price too. Combining the two concepts only makes sense, and it lets us put a unique spin on what exactly the 'pollution' is.

Kaladesh, interestingly enough, avoids some of these themes. "Artifice on Kaladesh exists in harmony with the environment, and the creatures of Kaladesh have adapted to its presence", as the Worlds of Magic Origins says. Also, the "Æther canisters" that power all technology in Kaladesh don't seem to pollute the environment like coal-powered steam engines do (though their workings, production, and effects aren't discussed in much detail, admittedly). Last time, we discussed ways this could be addressed, if we decided to.

Now, if we're talking about technology this much, we're naturally leading our audience to expect that -

Expectation: Tesla is an artifact set.

Yep! Now, this is definitely one of the biggest expectations we're going to have to work to meet, since it comes with a lot of positives, but also some big challenges. The biggest challenge is that Magic has already had an artifact set - Mirrodin - that was, for a long time, the best-selling Magic set, and did a great job of nailing the artifact theme, even introducing something now vitally important to the game (Equipment) in doing so. 

Striving to make an artifact set that doesn't feel like Mirrodin but does feel like an amazing artifact set will be a big challenge... but I'm confident that we can do it! For one, we're in a brand new era of design, with many new tools and a radically different method to creating sets. For two, with Tesla being set in Kaladesh, we're in a brand new setting, one with a very different approach to artifacts, as Chah noted last time. With these two facts behind us, we have a lot of resources on our side.

The challenges that expectations like this one present to us are simultaneously some of our greatest inspirations. By trying to solve this problem, we'll find a lot of valuable design space, and produce some powerful insights. Solving problems like this is where some of the best, most inspired designs come from. So let's look over all these expectations, and identify the richest veins, the ones that will give us the most fruitful and exciting challenges.

And that's a great segue to our next topic: brainstorming some more expectations to design around.

Art by Willian Murai

This week's discussion topic is a fun one: I'd like for us to work together to write down all the expectations we have for the Kaladesh steampunk set.

Mark Rosewater did this same design task with the design teams of Innistrad and Theros. This design exercise is all about the expectations people have of a genre and setting, and it's the biggest source we have for design inspiration with a top-down set like Tesla.

With Innistrad, they filled a whiteboard with stuff like "death", "graveyards", "the cellar door", and so o.. With Theros, they filled it with "Gods, Heroes, and Monsters", and things therein. Both of these whiteboards would became the basis for not only the set's mechanic, but also its game-play experience, and many individual card designs.

To make it easier, let's break down our expectations into three categories:

• What do you expect from the steampunk set?
• What do you expect from the artifact set (that isn't Mirrodin)?
• What do you expect from the Kaladesh set? 

That last one is something I'm especially interested in hearing from you all about, as it's my planned topic for next week; discussing what expectations Kaladesh brings to the table, and how we can use them to our advantage.

Until next time, have a good week!