Tesla—Getting the Gears Turning

I’m overjoyed to announce that as of today I’ll be joining this blog’s cast of Artisans. I wasn’t involved in either Great Designer Search, but I’ve done a whole lot of design work in the intervening years and I’ve learned an enormous amount from the discussions that take place here. I hope to provide similar opportunities for all of you.

[Editor's Note: Jules won the very first contest held here almost three years ago to the day — let's just say his work has improved noticeably.]

Tesla has been on the back burner for a while now, so I thought I’d get design started up again. When last we left, the set was pretty undefined. All we really knew was that we were starting with Mecha because they have the potential to be a marquee mechanic for the block. Chah was in the middle of iterating upon the Mecha mechanic, and many ideas had been proposed; here are a few of them:

Aura Style

This is more or less where we started; combining your pieces gives you a powerful creature, but opens you up to 2-for-1s which leaves us with two options: make a Rise of the Eldrazi-like format where it’s hard to remove big creatures, or make them powerful enough to justify combining anyway. The second approach leads to really swingy gameplay that I think we could do without, but the first option is still very much on the table.

Nonetheless, there are a bunch of logistical issues. Will players think the combined card is summoning sick or not? Will it matter how long the parts have been out? How do we get the cards aligned correctly? These questions can be answered by reminder text, but there has to be an easier way. One option was to combine them at the end step, but that leaves extra room for feel bad moments when your Mecha gets you 2-for-1ed before you can even attack. I want Mecha to attack:

Well okay, tapping is still necessary in case a player grants one vigilance, but you get the idea. This version has the added bonus of moving the game forward: building an ROE-like environment involves lots of cards that can lead to board stalls, so we want to get the game going once the bombs hit the table. Eldrazi do that with promises of card advantage, but this version gives us an unobtrusive way to require it.

But maybe Rise isn’t the way to go. How else can we convince people to make Mecha without making them overly "swingy"? The easiest way is to take away the card disadvantage of getting one killed.

Totem Armor Style

This does wonders for letting Mecha combine multiple times per game, but comes with a major issue of its own: How do you choose which part gets saved? If the controller chooses, it leads to repetitive gameplay with a strong Mecha part; if an opponent chooses, it hurts the recombination process because they’ll try to screw you out of either heads or bodies.

Chah split the difference by letting you usually choose in combat, and an opponent when they have removal, but there’s no intuition behind this version. In fact, it’s counter-intuitive: everyone I’ve ever met is perplexed by Murderous Redcap trading with Kitchen Finks having a different result depending on whose turn it is. It may turn out that the gameplay is worth it, but this mechanic has got enough going on that I want to avoid steepening the learning curve if at all possible.

Banding Style

Another way to avoid too many 2-for-1s is to let players disassemble their Mecha. In order to make that capability more relevant, Chah proposed making the “heads” flying machines that slot into previously immobile (read: Defender) bodies.

This setup does a lot to differentiate heads and bodies, which should help avoid disappointing moments where players think they can build a Mecha only to discover they actually have two heads. On the other hand, it makes it harder to understand what’s going on because the front halves now have attributes that don’t map to the backs. Moreover, any banding implementation we choose necessarily adds board complexity because letting Mecha deconstruct only stops two-for-ones if it can be done at instant speed.

Scavenge Style

But who says Mecha need to combine from play in the first place? If you make them out of scrap metal it’s pure value!

Now Scavenge had a lukewarm reception, in large part because looking at just the Scavenge ability makes it look horribly inefficient. Using the casting costs requires a little bit of math on the player’s part, but it stops a cheap cost on one piece from undercutting costs on more expensive pieces, doesn’t require players to remember another cost, and looks more appealing at first glance.

Unfortunately, this solution both requires that players monitor the ‘yard and needs something to avoid repetitive gameplay (as shown, staying one card, though there are other options).

Last-Ditch Style

This version is also a freebie, but may exacerbate issues with players refusing to kill Mecha parts to keep them from combining. The cost is a little bit awkward in that the same resulting Mecha costs different amounts depending on which piece dies. Nevertheless, I prefer this over free combination because it allows for shields-down moments, and that incentivizes the Mecha player to attack.

As templated, it should be possible to combine a head and a body that die together, but I’m not sure if players will expect that to be the case. This version has some nice inherent balancing in that the easier a Body is to kill (and thus combine), the more fragile the resulting Mecha. Therefore they’re a bit less likely to run away with games.

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So that’s where we currently stand. We have a lot of options, but before delving any further into the Mecha mechanic itself we need to address another issue Chah identified. The Mecha mechanics are splashy, but most of them don’t really shake up the gameplay experience like, say, Werewolves did for Innistrad.

There’s nothing wrong with having a mechanic like that in our set, but it can’t define our set. So we need to ask ourselves: What is Tesla about? Hopefully the Mecha tie into that, so I’m going to leave you with a challenge.

Pick an implementation of Mecha you like and identify design space that interacts with the mechanic. Then design a card or mechanic that demonstrates how we might explore that space in Tesla. I’ll use the lowest hanging fruit as an example: Scavenge style Mecha synergize with a self-mill theme; we could include Dredge.

Of course, if you have a different idea for how to implement Mecha, feel free to post it below along with some mechanical space that works with your implementation. I’m looking forward to seeing what you all come up with!

EDIT: A lot of people seem to feel that the Mecha are holding Tesla back. If you don't like Mecha, please submit a different mechanic for a Tesla and we'll discuss those pitches as well.