Tesla Horizons: Self-Contained, Board Tracking, and Explicit Progress Mechanics

We're moving forward with exploratory design for Tesla, and after looking at different ways to mechanically represent our progress theme last week it's time to examine what some of those implementations might do to the surrounding set.

We looked at too many options to examine in just one post, so for this week we're just going to look at the first couple.

Personal Growth

The first category is progress mechanics that allow a single card to improve itself. That's a pretty broad category that can have gameplay ranging from forbidding attacks like Primal Cocoon to encouraging them like Power-Up:

The one point of consistency is that players are going to be sinking time (and potentially other resources) into improving a single card. That makes removal much more likely to cause blowouts. Balancing around that isn't hard, but making fun gameplay is. Our best bet would be to tone down the removal like Rise of the Eldrazi and Theros did to the point where anything can be answered, but it's inconvenient to do so.

The other notable impact choosing this category has is locking in what counters we can use. We don't want to have, say, both +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters showing up in conjunction because it makes it difficult for players to keep track of what's happening on the board just by looking at it. Power-Up uses charge counters in order to be compatible with noncreature artifacts, but that choice would mean no +1/+1 counters for Tesla.

Circuit Board

Both of those issues can just disappear if instead of each permanent monitoring its own progress we track progress with the permanents themselves.

The potential downside is that permanents have a tendency to leave the battlefield, which might undermine the progress analogy. We don't want to remove that interactivity for the sake of the metaphor because that will leave players feeling helpless every time their opponent does something powerful.

It's possible that the number sometimes going down won't ruin the feeling, but if we go down this path we'll have a careful balance to strike between building ever larger boards and keeping every permanent answerable. Even if we succeed, more clogged boards generally lead to more board complexity.

Steady Progress

The other option is to look for a quantity that neither has to be tracked on an individual card nor shrinks. I floated a number alternatives last week and some of you came up with more. But let's start with the most basic; count progress explicitly:

Progress counters could just be referenced by cards that give them to players, but without a high density they'll spend much of the game having to be tracked for no gain. The alternative is to give them inherent rules baggage like poison counters or my old proposals for gold. Depending on the implementation that could also make the cards a bit less parasitic, but the counters would need to feel like progress themselves to avoid making cards that grant them too complex.

Your task for this week is to design a common that fits into one of these potential Teslas, whether that means playing with one of the above mechanics, or experimenting with something else in the same space. To help get the gears turning, here's one more example card for each category: (Self-Contained: Lorescale Coatl, Board-Tracking: Predatory Sliver, Explicit: Gus.