Tesla: Put it to the Test

For those of you who might have missed it, throughout the last week we playtested a variety of mechanical elements exploring the theme of progress for Tesla. First of all I want to offer up a big thank you to everyone who participated in the playtesting or contributed designs for it. I compiled as many of those as I could and filled out the rest of the commons to play with. Things went really well and we learned a lot, as can you by reading through the playtesters’ observations.

So the question now is where to next? It’s a testament to the prowess of our designers here that every single mechanic we tried had some fun gameplay to it, but they can’t all stay. The key to this process is iterating to the best place we can be, and even if we had already found all the best possible mechanics, we simply have too many. To help break it down I’m listing some selling points and challenges for each of the mechanics we tried as well as one possible way to address an issue or two. So tell me: what should stay as is, what we should tweak, and what should go?

Mecha

We’ve discussed Mecha at length, and every version has its own strengths and pitfalls, but there are some common themes. On the plus side, Mecha are awesome. Not just in the LEGO Movie sense either, they truly can inspire awe. While that emotional impact may not bear directly on gameplay, it’s not to be underestimated. After all, what more is a game than a means of giving someone an experience? What’s more, the gameplay has potential too. There seems to be a nice wide middle ground where they feel powerful but don’t completely take over the game.

Of course, it’s not all puppies and dandelions. Mecha come with a whole host of issues. From collation of not one, but two DFCs per pack to high comprehension complexity, they beg a lot of questions. Is a Mech summoning sick if one of its halves was? What happens when something combines while it has an aura on it, or is being targeted by a spell? On top of that the mechanic is inherently highly parasitic and might even cause frustration within its own biodome when players draw too many copies of the same half. The summoning sickness issue, at least, could be solved like this:

Progress 2.0

This mechanic truly plays out feeling like progress (especially when triggered by progressively larger spells). It builds up over time, makes you rethink how to sequence your plays, and just feels good. Sounds like everything I want in a mechanic.

But I’m not even sure we can print it. Are LSPs going to have the right intuitions about what constitutes a single mana spending event? If people think Firebreathing is going to work then there’s no way we can justify printing this. If we dodge that bullet, there are still other issues. This mechanic is really tough to develop because mana curves leave decks with so many lower costed cards. A 1/1 with Progress 2.0 is barely weaker than a 2/2, and a 1/2 is actually stronger! Balancing the low-powered cards would entail making them look completely unappealing, but perhaps there’s a happy middle ground to make strong-looking cards with greater starting power. We could keep activated abilities from causing further balance issues like this:

Dominance

In our testing Dominance felt awesome when you achieved it, but didn’t generally decide the game right there. On top of that, it leaves lots of room for interaction and rewards players for things they want to do anyway, which is a recipe for appeal.

Of course, it does have the potential to snowball. While having the highest-powered creature doesn’t always mean you’re already winning, there’s certainly a positive correlation, but the bigger issue is when one player comes out of the gates strong and gets a crushing advantage from Dominance spells before their opponent can mount a defense. The only other apparent issue was confusion over what happens when there are no creatures on the board, which we can solve like so:

Overthrow

Overthrow played out a lot like Dominance: fun, interactive gameplay, potential to snowball, and danger of a crushing early game. It even offered a few more decision points to interest high-level players.

But in addition to Dominance’s troubles, Overthrow added one more. It doesn’t particularly feel like making progress most of the time. I think Jay Treat's right, Overthrow is better suited for another set. But I'm here to give everything a fair shake, so what can we do?

Well, while generally gameplay should speak for itself, other factors influence how we interpret it. Coherent enough flavor that matches up might just do the trick.

Bully

Bully lead to a lot of fresh combat evaluation without feeling overpowering. It did an excellent job of making creatures harder to block without removing interaction, it may be an even more fun mechanic than our old standby flying on 2 and 3 power creatures.

Of course, that was all within this nice biodome crafted to support it. Bully starts feeling a lot less interactive on creatures with higher power. Making Giant Growths into Angelic Blessings might not be the worst thing in the world, but Oakenforms are more problematic. Maybe we can get away without low rarity permanent power boosts in Tesla, but we have to consider casual play as well. That said, I don’t see much room to address these issues without losing what Bully has going for it; if you do, please share.

Transcend

Transcend didn’t exactly get its day in the sun with this playtest. The cards didn’t offer enough reward to really entice testers into working towards transcendence, some of that was due to the cards themselves, but those were already pushing the boundary into uncommon, so there’s only so much more they could do.

A better route might be to make the mechanic more inherently impactful like Jay Treat suggested:

Refine

Like Dominance, Refine feels rewarding to achieve. Well, at least when we put it on the right sort of card: the Refine bonus should always feel significant. The mechanic offers a lot of interesting drafting and deckbuilding decisions to the player using it, and even some in-game interest on the topic of whether to wait for Refinement. Unfortunately, absent a card like Magitech Salvager, it’s not much in the way of player interaction.

There’s also the issue of decks becoming less diverse as players are encouraged to play the same casrds in every deck that wants a given Refine spell. We’ll come back to that in just  a moment.

Eureka!

Eureka! felt good when you got a free draw trigger, but as we learned with Miracles like Bonfire of the Damned, this space can cause a lot of problems when you have to worry about cheating on the tournament circuit. I might be willing to bite the bullet if the mechanic had enough going for it, but despite this playtest having at least 120% as many copies of the cards as the real set, the same name clause rarely came up. Where it did matter was making players hold off on casting these in the vain hope of getting the trigger if they drew their second copy.

All those critiques withstanding, the flavor really does come through. Perhaps there’s another way to capture it using what we learned from Refine:

Mine

Mine does a good job filling the Scry role for a smoothing mechanic. In the early game it can always guarantee a land and later on it helps you find what you need. It also enables graveyard synergies like Refine without as much feel-bad as conventional self-mill.

Of course, there is still some potential for bad experiences when an LSP hits two of their favorite cards and has to throw one in the bin. Perhaps more problematically, when you don’t need any more lands late in the game there’s still a 40% chance you’ll hit one right off the bat and see no spells. One option to abate that issue is not to make you keep the land:

Power Source

And finally we come to Power Source. The mechanic was hard to test in our Sealed decks because it demands one of two things to get going: a critical mass, which is hard to accomplish outside of draft, or individually impactful cards, which would normally be found at uncommon and rare. AlexC and Ben Nassau have put together some casual constructed decks, so hopefully we’ll get to see it in action soon.

That said, I do already have some suspicions about problems we’re likely to run across. Even one piece that impacts the board is going to cause enormous board complexity when everyone has to keep careful track of how many times it can be used on a given turn. Ideally we want to capture the idea of building your own machine without all of that. I suggest:

Now it’s time for your input. Which mechanics deserve more time and which should we let go? How can we improve the mechanics we keep? What excites you about the mechanics you favor? I don't know about you, but I'm pretty excited about where Tesla's headed.