Tesla Horizons: What's it Gonna' Cost?

As we've continued exploratory design for Tesla we've been looking at each of our options for mechanically representing Tesla's progress theme (as discussed here). Each piece examines what a few of the possible implementations might do to the surrounding set.

The first post looked at cards that improved themselves, tracking progress with the battlefield, and explicitly counting progress counters.

The second post investigated using lands and mana to track how far you've progressed.

The third post considered how we could track progress using the graveyard rather than the battlefield.

Finally, today we'll take a look at the last area we identified for tracking progress: the cost of our cards.

Long-term Investment

This isn't the first time we've played around in this area. The design space is deep, has the range to accommodate many different themes, and inherently matches the pacing dictated by the mana system. It sounds like a wonder that we haven't seen it used more before.

The main issue is that it entails a lot of comprehension complexity, in part because referring to a variable value is inherently texty, but mostly because the term "converted mana cost" sounds more complicated than it is to the point where many players assume any intuitions they form are wrong. There are no two ways about it: we need a new template. But it turns out it's not all that easy to find a good one.

Nonetheless, we've been pursuing variations of Iteration since before Playtest #1, and the designs in this post contain a few new approaches to rewording CMC.

We've continued to consider progress mechanics relying on converted mana cost evaluation as recently as the last post in this series.

You can read discussions of those particular mechanics in the linked posts, so for now let's discuss how else we might want to play in this space.

Being Up-Front

Iteration certainly looks like fruitful space to explore, but we'd be remiss not to consider other approaches hitting the same notes. The scaling hoop leads to a nice self-balancing mechanism, but that doesn't necessarily mean its worth the added complexity involved in checking it. We could be comparing CMC to a fixed quantity.

Or doing no comparison at all.

Groundwork doesn't feel like progress on a lone card unless it's growing like Iteration, but with high enough as-fan each subsequent card can feel like it's doing more and more in an Ally-like fashion. However, in that scenario I suspect the aggregated board complexity of each permanent triggering on a different subset of spells would do it in.

Advance has the potential to be really swingy, doing either nothing or too much. But if we can manage to get the variance within a reasonable range in a set with lots of artifacts, it does have the potential to grow along with your mana better than implementations with triggering thresholds because on turn five you can cast a two drop and a three drop.

Time is Money

There's no rule saying our mechanic needs to sit on the board and patiently await ever larger spells. We could look at the graveyard to see one subset of what's already been cast, or at the battlefield to see the other.

Manufacture seems to take a simpler tact than scaling with the highest cost, but I'm afraid that it doesn't engender enough of a feeling of momentum as is, and trying to track multiple thresholds gets texty quickly.

But there's one more place worth look for big spells: the hand.

The flavor here could use a bit of work, but in order to evoke progress each smaller spell is going to have to feel like a step towards the larger one. I'm not sure whether we can achieve that metaphor, but my first swing definitely didn't hit it out of the park. Assuming we get something similar to work, we get exciting gameplay with your opponent anticipating a big bomb, but at the cost of possible snowballing advantages when players curve out.

Over Budget

This post isn't exhaustive: one could, for instance, imagine a riff on Clash that always pushed more expensive spells to the top and cheaper cards to the bottom. That said, I think these are going to be our most fruitful avenues for pursuing a feeling of progress via Converted Mana Cost checks. If you feel otherwise I'd love to hear your reasoning. Whatever the case, for this week take a shot at designing for one of these mechanics or something else in this space.