Tesla: Mechanical Engineering

It’s been a productive week for Tesla! Between our thematic explorations and the most recent Weekend Art Challenge  we’ve generated a ton of ideas. I don’t have room to go over all of them, but there were some definite common threads. The plan is to identify them so we can find their best executions and fit them together in a cohesive theme. Without further ado: 

Progress

Whether we have robots killing off all human life, big corporations working their employees to death, or Steampunk engineers messing with volatile forces, the story boils down to the dangers of deifying progress. With that much emphasis, the progress itself had better be visible. The most popular implementation was using Kindle-like mechanics to improve your spells with each casting. I especially liked Chops’ tweak:

Refine solves most of Kindle’s major issues. For one thing, the mechanic’s no longer parasitic. Moreover, we don’t need awkward cards like Pardic Firecat to make the ability relevant in draft. Of course, there are plenty of other ways to convey progress, but if we follow the Kindle route this version has my vote.

Transcendence

A few of the possible themes we’re pursuing demand a way to show people moving beyond their humanity. Most of those have been inherent to the creature cards themselves, but Evan Jones proposed another approach.

Augment ends up playing a bit more like Rancor than a standard equipment, and that's generally a good thing since it allows us to print augmentations with more appealing costs tht won't dominate the battlefield. Of course, equipment work the way they do for a reason: players expect to be able to move them, but adhering strictly to implant flavor should quash that expectation.

All Together Now

Any setting involving class struggle, loss of identity, or the formation of a hive mind is going to need to show synchronization. That feeling is easiest to capture with a mechanic like Conspire which uses multiple creatures for one task, and Inanimate came up with the cleanest version yet.

Galvanize doesn’t have quite as much game play value as Convoke because noncreature artifacts just do fewer things, but Convoke was the best designed mechanic in the entire Ravnica block, so I'm pretty optimistic.

Assembly Line

Almost any technological theme is going to benefit from a mechanic that can convey building something greater than the sum of its parts. After all, what else is technology? And with a description like that, it’s hard to resist trying to make this guy work.

That sort of goal is dangerous; it can lead us to make something less fun than it could be just to fit the requirements. That said, players are clamoring for contraptions, so we should at least try to deliver. We just need to be careful to judge the results objectively. My favorite idea thus far came independently from both Tight and Nich Grayson: tapping enough creatures at once to power your contraption.

That said, it’s certainly not perfect, and in trying to clean up the game play with a trigger I may have made it impossible to sync this version up with Steamflogger Boss. Hopefully we’ll find a good implementation for contraptions, but if not we’ll still want to convey the MacGuyver feel in some other way.

Sweet Ride

A rider-mount mechanic is something of a holy grail for Magic design, and figuring out vehicles runs into many of the same problems. Most of our attempts have ended up ignoring the specific creatures crewing the vessel, but Sanctaphrax came up with the idea of riffing on equipment.

Board keeps the creatures feeling like they’re on the same ship by always attacking and blocking as a unit. Players might assume they’re blocked as a unit too, and if that’s the case we’ll want to match that intuition. The tough part is doing so without falling into any of the numerous pitfalls collectively known as Banding.

Power Dynamics

A lot of our potential themes have undertones of haves and have-nots. We might well take after the real industrial revolution with masses of disenfranchised workers subjugated by the few in power.

I was all set to make this care about power, but Jay Treat recently ran an informal poll on Twitter and found that most of us agree about what qualifies as smaller: a creature with either less power or less toughness, and that doesn't have a greater number in the other stat. Assuming that works, Overlord conveys its concept pretty clearly. But the real kicker is the gameplay implications in a set full of equipment: you want to give the overlords all the toys that would normally be best to spread to your little creatures.

Grisly Discovery

Some of our theme ideas already have things going wrong, but if we opt to evoke enlightenment or a brighter future we’ll need our conflict to start out hidden. That could involve discovering a conspiracy among the plane’s leaders, disrupting the delicate balance of nature’s forces, or letting loose something primordial and terrifying.

Morph fits the bill and simultaneously lends us a bunch of conveniently nondescript creatures for workers who’ve lost their identities. Perhaps face-down creatures could represent normal workers who serve as vessels for whatever horrors are being unleashed upon the plane.

Salvage

On the topic of people poking around where they shouldn’t, we might want Teslans salvaging wonders from a lost civilization; alternatively, the same mechanics would work equally well in a setting where technology has already brought about society’s collapse. Courtesy of Aura:

Salvage has a lot of potential to do crazy things at higher rarities since it’s basically a more limited version of Imprint. Imprint never made sense at common, but luckily the way it’s set up allows Salvage to ignore the specifics of exiled cards without feeling weird.

Up Against Nature

And on the subject of collapse, Benjamin Wheeler came up with a very interesting take on a rusting mechanic. Unfortunately, it mostly reads as a downside, so I decided to flip the concept on its head using a drawback inspired by Nich Grayson’s Depth.

This current iteration would need a lot of artifact creatures to be justifiable, but rust could be more widely applied to all artifacts and up the cost for activated abilities as well.

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A lot of these mechanics have promise, but could use some iteration. Others are hitting on good thematic elements, but aren't delivering good enough gameplay. Take a crack at designing a better mechanic for any of these areas, or for something else thematic and underserved. Then next week we'll use those ideas to figure out where we're going with Tesla.