Tesla: MapQuest

[WotC Safe: No Original Designs in this Post]

We're still in exploratory design for Tesla, and as such we haven't nailed down many absolutes about where the eventual design is headed. Really all we know is that the set is going to involve artifacts and be themed around progress: change, improvement, and abandoning the old ways. That's all well and good, but thus far I've been leading you on a sort of haphazard perusal of design space.

Well not today. Exploratory design is supposed to map the territory, which means not just knowing what's out there, but where each fork in the road leads. We need an answer:

How does the way we represent our progress theme mechanically influence the rest of the design?

But it begs a more basic question:

What are our options for representing progress?

That's what I hope to answer today.

Grown-worthy Pun

How do we make things feel like they're moving forward? Like they're getting better? What about by making them get better?

And as we all know: bigger is better.

But we're not limited to growth alone. Power and toughness are just two facets of a much broader space: cards that improve a little bit every time you use them.

On permanents this will often mean tracking the improvement with counters, but Knight of the Reliquary also falls into this camp. This linear growth is predictable and tends to feel like steady improvement.

But it's not how technological growth works in the real world. That's exponential. That is, the rate of growth is proportional to the growth that's already happened.

Attack with Kalonian Hydra and it'll be an 8/8. Attack again and it's a 16/16. A third time makes it a-

Oh, wait, your opponent's dead.

Exponential growth is exciting and it has the potential to make incredible things happen. That makes it a perfect fit for a mythic rare, but not so much for a common. Well, at least not the way we've looked at it so far. No common should just take over the game by itself.

But what about in conjunction? Zendikar's Allies each trigger whenever any ally comes down on your side. It's not exponential growth, but for ones like Ondu Cleric which count the number of allies you control, it's polynomial rather than linear. More importantly, it still feels explosive.

And here's the important point: it doesn't matter what accurately reflects the world. What matters is making the cards feel right to the players. We'll need to test to be sure, but I suspect that polynomial growth will prove to be a perfectly good analogy for the feeling we're trying to convey; the real question in my mind is whether we can get away with linear.

Further Afield

Now there's another aspect to the Allies I haven't mentioned yet. Unlike my first few examples, they aren't self contained. By and large each subsequent Ally will be more impactful than the last, but there's nothing to stop a Day of Judgment from setting the ones in your hand back to square one. That's good for reducing snowballing power in gameplay, but it may undermine the feeling we're going for. So let's look at some other things that tend to expand as the game goes on.

Lands are much less prone to dying than creatures, but calling them out explicitly like this begs the card to have some connection to nature or exploration. That is to say, land counting doesn't feel flavor-neutral to enfranchised players and that may prevent us from using the space to connote technological progress. Luckily we have a workaround.

Lands tap for mana.

Looming Shade gets bigger and bigger as the game goes on; in isolation it looks like the perfect fit. But if you've ever had two Shades on board you know how much they fight for resources. We can't pick a singular implementation for something that's going to have high as-fan if it upsets players every time they end up with two. There are other permanent types to consider, but any set built around, say, artifacts is going to have enough removal for them to mirror the creature problems.

Zoning Out

So let's move on from the battlefield to other zones.

Mark Rosewater often gives his eponymous card as an example of green's growth. Which is strange, given that in a normal game of Magic Maro gets smaller over time as you only draw one card per turn, but often play two. However plenty of other zones do grow as the game goes on. 

Barring Delve shenanigans the occasional Disentomb isn't enough to keep graveyards from growing. This seems like prime territory to explore for our progress theme. Cards in the graveyard certainly can feel like things that came before, and with designs like Kindle each "advance" can lead to further improvements.

We could look at cards in exile as an ultimate sort of irreversible progress, but there are far fewer backwards interactions than with the graveyard, and aside from potentially easier development due to lower power level, I don't really see the advantage.

We could also try to look at decreasing library size, but that's a pain to count. The stack empties too regularly to be a stage for progress, and nothing's going on in the command zone. So if we want yet more options we'll need to look beyond where the cards move. What else changes in a consistent direction as the game goes on?

Turned on its Head

Well, the game is on a later turn, but beyond Serra Avenger's cutoff it gets rather unwieldily to figure out what turn it is. Doing so also undercuts one of the greatest strengths of the mana system: you're not entirely sure which turn you'll have access to which cards.

Hmm, speaking of the mana system...

Converted mana cost is by no means a perfect indicator of how long the game's gone, but a large percentage of games involve a player waiting to draw more lands or draw their expensive bomb so that they can cast something big. Of course, if we wanted to care about converted mana cost at common we'd need to find a way to make it read intuitively.

Our final option is easy to track and has nothing to do with cards at all.

Barring one-sided affairs with large Lifelink creatures and specialized constructed decks, life totals tend downwards as the game goes on. On the other hand, they're a central enough part of the game that it's going to be pretty hard to pass off decreasing your opponent's life total as "making technological advances" as opposed to "beating them to a bloody pulp with a warhammer."

Forward March February

So right off the bat tracking graveyards looks like it holds the most promise, but we'll certainly want to look into every option that has potential. In the meantime, what space are you excited to explore for progress mechanics and what do you propose we do with it?