Tesla: Change of Pace

We’ve been discussing how to express progress and change for Tesla in general sense. I’m sure we could debate possible mechanics until the end of time, but at the end of the day that’s not enough. After all, Magic sets need to do more than look good; they need to play well. Thus we need to play with the cards. That leaves us with two things to take care of: scheduling a playtest and deciding on cards to play with.

Like Clockwork

The first part’s easy. Just navigate over to this doodle and fill in the times you’d like to playtest online and/or coordinate times with other designers over social media. Please include an email address so that I can get you the relevant files and info to use LackeyCCG, or email me directly at julesdrobinsATgmailDOTcom. In two weeks time we'll be ready to go!

Wait, two weeks? That’s right. This week we’ll be figuring out what to playtest, and next week we’ll fill out the file for our playtest. That means a grand total of 101 commons, so if you want to get a head start I’d recommend prioritizing common designs today. But what are we designing today? We haven’t even picked mechanics!

Nuts and Bolts

When exploring new space it’s a good idea to try a lot of different implementations in the first playtest. For one thing, it’s just plain efficient. We’ll end up with information to select from among a bunch of mechanics instead of just iterating one. For another thing, it lets us see how pieces might interlock.

Wait a minute...

Aren’t we trying to build toward a set? That demands cohesion! In this early stage it’s fine to have two versions of the same mechanic, but their interactions don’t matter. After all, Theros didn’t have two different mechanics to represent heroism; we want to be consistent about how we portray our building blocks.

But right now we’re at the theme level. We’re certainly not going to want two different mechanics that both exile artifacts from graveyards to grow creatures, but the more general feeling of progress is supposed to pervade the set. There’s no reason we can’t have multiple mechanics play into that, in fact, we should.

The key is to achieve multiple goals with each so that every mechanic has a place. Once more we look to Innistrad. Werewolves and Morbid both hit the sense of foreboding and dread that pervade the set, but each also serves a more direct role representing central pieces of the genre: dark transformation and death respectively.

If you look back over the Tesla discussion we’ve generated an enormous number of fitting mechanics. Even with room to try different versions there’s no way we can test all of them, so here’s what we’re going to do. Everyone pick your favorite mechanic evoking progress, either from what we’ve done before or a brand new design. Assuming they can fit, all of those will make their way into the playtest file. So what are you waiting for? Progress ain’t gonna’ make itself!