Tesla: Playtest Engineering I: Structure

This article is WotC safe.

Hello again, everybody! I hope you've all been enjoying your holidays, and that you continue to do so! Now, back to business. This week, I'll be starting a three-part series on designing an all commons playtest, from start to finish. First off, we'll be discussing the overall structure of a playtest set, and how one can use concepts like as-fan to help quickly create such a structure, using our custom collaborative set Tesla as an example. (The lessons in this article are great for anyone looking to design a set, though!)

Tesla: Our Refinery

Hello again, everybody! Last time, we began the task of finding the candidate mechanics for Tesla, using the expectations of Kaladesh to narrow our search. Now our goal is to both refine these mechanics further, and begin generating commons for the mechanics that we can use for playtesting, which will be coming soon!

Without further ado, here's our list of candidate mechanics:

Tesla: Battle-Forging Ahead

Hello again, everyone! Last week, I asked everyone to nominate promising mechanics that we had discussed the week before, and one mechanic clearly came out on top: Battle-Forged. Battle-Forged began long ago as 'Tune-Up', but over time, developed into the form we'll be talking about today. This week, let's strike while the iron is hot, and focus our discussion on this promising mechanic. Specifically, I'd like to hammer out the kinks with Battle-Forged, and in addition, stoke up a discussion about what the role of Battle-Forged in Tesla will be. Now, without further ado, let's begin!

Tesla: Go Interaction

Hello again, everyone! Last week, I gave everyone the challenge to design progress mechanics that encouraged or facilitated interaction - but, because I like to be tricky, I didn't take any efforts to define exactly what counts as interaction. In your designs, many of you explored different forms of interaction in gameplay - and in the comments, there was some great discussion about what is interaction, and what isn't.

This week, I'm going to try to go over a few of the more frequent forms of interaction, using mechanics submitted or brought up last week as examples.