Tesla: Our Refinery

Hello again, everybody! Last time, we began the task of finding the candidate mechanics for Tesla, using the expectations of Kaladesh to narrow our search. Now our goal is to both refine these mechanics further, and begin generating commons for the mechanics that we can use for playtesting, which will be coming soon!

Without further ado, here's our list of candidate mechanics:

• Progress
• Advance (When you untap ten or more permanents at once, you become advanced.)
• Or any of its other variants, such as Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Access the Machine, and effects Pray. Each can be playtested separately.
• Advancement (Your advancement is the largest number of generic mana in the cost of a permanent you control.)
• Battle-Forged (At end of combat, if this creature attacked this turn and has less than N +1/+1 counters on it, put a +1/+1 counter on it.)
• Board (cost) ((cost): Target creature you boards this vehicle as long as you control both. Board only as a sorcery.)
• Creatures can only be aboard one vehicle at a time. Vehicles can hold any number of creatures. They grant a bonus or ability to creatures aboard them.
• Another possibility: Crew (At the beginning of combat, you may tap two untapped creatures you control) and the cards reward you for crewing them. Crew can be used for any operated machinery, not just vehicles.
• Innovation
• "Vision pile" — This is more of a broad idea than an actual mechanic at this point. An outside place to hold cards that other cards in the game interact with, to - for example - fetch at a later point. Meant to capture 'research and development'.
• An example mechanic for the vision pile: Brainstorm (Exile the top card of your library into your vision pile. You may put an artifact card you own from your vision pile into your hand.)
• Combine (As ~ attacks along with a OTHER PART, you may transform and join them into a single card until end of turn.)
• Historically troublesome and a competitor with assembling contraptions. Let's see if we can improve this, or even combine them (harhar).
• Assembling Contraptions — Here are the 'knowns' for Assembling Contraptions:
• It is an action creatures take, not players. Think along the lines of attacking or blocking, not outlasting.
• Contraptions are an artifact Subtype. Whether it creates or interacts with Contraptions is unknown, but it's more likely to be the former.
• A creature can assemble two Contraptions at once rather than one.
• Tinker (When this enters the battlefield, you may put a +1/+1 or charge counter on an artifact you control, or put a 1/1 colorless Thopter artifact creature with flying onto the battlefield.)
• Wordiness poses a big problem, but this has a lot of potential. Can we simplify this without losing its spirit?
• Exploitation and Dominance
• Justice — Cards with justice first declare that something your opponent could do is 'against the law' - the specific 'something' depends on the card. At the beginning of each upkeep, if an opponent broke the law last turn, each card triggers its justice effect.
• To represent the consul.
• Surge — Whenever you activate a nonland ability, you may pay (cost). If you do, trigger a cool effect.
• To represent 'natural magic'.
• Charge (Put a colorless Canister artifact token onto the battlefield with “, Sacrifice this: Untap target permanent. Activate only as a sorcery.”)
• To represent aether canisters and resource exploitation. Even if we don't do Charge exactly, we'll probably be seeing Canister tokens in some fashion.

This isn't the final list, of course. All of the mechanics above are subject to change, replacement, or removal, depending on how much we can improve them, and how well they hold up in playtesting.

In addition to our goal of refining these mechanics to become the best they can possibly be, another goal is to start generating commons for the mechanics. We want commons both for playtesting, and to see how common-friendly our mechanic is. This means all the commons we make featuring the mechanics should strive to be as simple and elegant as possible. If all your example commons for a mechanic are red-flagged, for any reason, that perhaps means the mechanic isn't common-friendly enough. While not all mechanics have to appear at common, these mechanics are meant to be the themes of the set, so they should!

Alright then! To reiterate: the goal this week is to work to improve the candidate mechanics, and to begin generating common cards for the candidate mechanics for playtesting.

Next time, we'll either discuss playtesting in further detail, or shine a spotlight on any particularly troublesome mechanics, depending on how the conversation goes.