The Perfect Storm: Vanishing, Allies, Ferocious, and Monarch

 Welcome to the next installment of "The Perfect Storm", a recurring article series where I randomly choose four mechanics rated between 5 and 7 on Mark Rosewater's Storm Scale and write about what environment those mechanics would need to return. This week: Vanishing, Allies, ferocious, and monarch. Check out the first installment of The Perfect Storm here.

The Perfect Storm: Rally, Adventure, Manifest, and Adamant

 Mark Rosewater's Storm Scale is an unofficial measurement for how likely a certain mechanic is to appear in an upcoming set. He has described in detail what every numerical rating from 1 (evergreen mechanics) to 10 (broke the game in half the first time) means; many of the ratings in the middle are things that "require the right environment" in order to return, but their return is plausible. This made me realize: Wouldn't evaluating exactly what these mechanics would require to come back be excellent knowledge for Magic design scholars?

Welcome to the first in my new series: The Perfect Storm. I have collected every mechanic worth writing about that were rated a 5 ("We need to find the right place to bring it back, but I'm optimistic"), 6 ("We need to find the right place to bring it back, but I'm a little less optimistic"), or 7 ("It's unlikely to return, but possible if the right environment comes along") on the Storm Scale as of 2020. Each installment, I will select four of these mechanics at random and write about what environment they would actually need in order to be reprinted. I ended up with rally, adventure, manifest, and adamant for my first outing – let's get cracking.

Lenses for Friends: Making Mechanics Interesting

Last time in Lenses for Friends, we introduced the lenses of gameplay and experience. Today, we're introducing the lens of interest, and sharing a story about helping a friend with it. I've seen more designers struggle with this lens than any other.

Also: check out Episodes 59 and 60 of the Beacon of Creation custom Magic design podcast, to see these lenses used in action. I made a guest appearance helping Bradley Rose, Adam Victor Klesh, and Juliet Louis with their community set, Castmire!

Lenses for Friends: Making Mechanics Play Well and Tell Stories

As some may know, I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on the Beacon of Creation custom Magic design podcast, discussing their community designed set Castmire with Bradley Rose and Adam Victor Klesh. On that podcast, I mentioned something I called "mechanical lenses", which I use to evaluate the mechanics of game designs, especially for custom Magic design. Today, I'd like to begin a series where I formally introduce these mechanical lenses, by telling some stories about how I've used them to help fellow designers with their design troubles. In this part, we'll introduce two lenses which most designers think they're very familiar with already...

Big Picture Mechanics

What kinds of mechanics does a set need to click? If we were designing a new set, what sorts of mechanics would we want to be sure to include?

First, let's review the marketed mechanics from the last few years of sets and try to categorize them.

Weekend Art Challenge Review 021216—multiplayer mechanics

Weekend Art Challenge Review
Hello all. Guest goblin inspector Anastase here. It has been a busy weekend for Goblin Artisans, and it is time to inspect your craftsmanship. This is the challenge we are reviewing.

A few words on the challenge first:

Actually fulfilling all the requirements was very hard. A mechanic that works well both in duels and multiplayer usually has to scale upwards.

Making it general enough for the cards to be usable by all colors or a cycle of 5 color combinations requires to find a situation or trigger that all colors will care about.

Doing that while keeping the mechanic fun adds a layer of complexity on its own, since "fun" is a very broad term.

A few ways that have been proven to work are the will of the council, offering and dethrone cards, even though dethrone stayed in Grixis.

This challenge was meant as a way to make people think about the intersection of duels and multiplayer, about what is important to have to make a multi-player game tick. I secretly added a focus on combat (which is supposed to make MtG end and its major place of interaction) by asking to design one mechanic about that. The main phase restriction was more open-ended, but I had hoped for some way to make sorcery speed effects slightly more interactive.

The images were not restrictive this time, since you could suggest your own images if you had a mechanic that did not fit them.

I will present some more thoughts on this challenge and the nature of challenges in the conclusion of this article, but for now let us see some excellent cards!

Weekend Art Challenge 021216—multiplayer mechanics

Weekend Art Challenge
Hello Artisans, Anastase here, with yet another WAC. This time we are diving into politics. Will of the Council was an interesting idea during Conspiracy and that set had enough success to warrant an expansion.

Tesla: Playtest Engineering I: Structure

This article is WotC safe.

Hello again, everybody! I hope you've all been enjoying your holidays, and that you continue to do so! Now, back to business. This week, I'll be starting a three-part series on designing an all commons playtest, from start to finish. First off, we'll be discussing the overall structure of a playtest set, and how one can use concepts like as-fan to help quickly create such a structure, using our custom collaborative set Tesla as an example. (The lessons in this article are great for anyone looking to design a set, though!)

Tesla: Your Own Resources

This article is WotC safe.

Hi everyone! Last time, we discussed the art of making commons for playtesting mechanics, and continued our work over at the Tesla Project forum. Since last time, we've had some great commons, but playtesting is understandably hampered by the difficulty of collecting all the cards from across the forum posts, past articles, and so on. Well, no longer - this week, I have a lot of resources to share with you all! In addition, I also have some mechanics in need I'd like for us to focus on this week.

Tesla: Make Common Cause

This article is WotC safe.

Hello again everyone! Last time, the Tesla Project forum debuted, where the discussion from Our Refinery has continued nicely. Over the past week, alongside discussing proposals and alterations for the candidate mechanics, many of us have begun to design example commons for the mechanics - which leads directly into our topic for this week, designing commons for playtesting our mechanics.

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:

Tesla: Self-Improvement

Hello again, everyone! As we've been looking at the mechanics that Tesla can use to represent its themes of progress, one big idea keeps coming up: players themselves progressing and improving over the course of the game. This week, let's reflect on some 'self-improvement' mechanics you all have designed, try to improve them further, and perhaps design some more mechanics capturing the same themes as well.

Tesla: Go Interaction

Hello again, everyone! Last week, I gave everyone the challenge to design progress mechanics that encouraged or facilitated interaction - but, because I like to be tricky, I didn't take any efforts to define exactly what counts as interaction. In your designs, many of you explored different forms of interaction in gameplay - and in the comments, there was some great discussion about what is interaction, and what isn't.

This week, I'm going to try to go over a few of the more frequent forms of interaction, using mechanics submitted or brought up last week as examples.

Tesla: Design Challenge 062915 — Interactive Progress

In last week's discussion about the kinds of progress and anticipation that we might use in Tesla, we talked about certainty. If progress is too certain, Jenesis notes, then Tesla games devolve into "solitaire resource-accumulation". If progress is too uncertain, Lee Owens observes, and "when it works, you aren't happy that your machine finally worked. You are frustrated that it took so long to do something it was built to do". The problem is finding a balance between these.

Jenesis did note one solution: interaction. If your opponent has nothing hidden, outcomes are certain - but if they have an unknown, hidden variable, all your results become uncertain. This changing nature of interaction allows us to find a balance in a fun and natural way. This week, let's explore this further. Your challenge is to design something that uses progress in an interactive way. 

Tesla: Forms the Future Takes

[Editor's Note: Today we're excited to welcome Inanimate to the Goblin Artisans team! We've appreciated his insightful observations in the discussions on the site and look forward to seeing more as he takes the reigns as Lead Designer for Tesla.]

I'm honored to serve as Lead Designer of Tesla after Jules, and I wish him well in his new position! I hope to continue Jules' work on Tesla with the same passion and dedication.

Lately, Tesla has been exploring two themes: anticipation and progress. As we have designed cards to capture these two themes, it's become clear that there are many forms the future takes: different kinds of anticipation and progress, each a different experience... and it has been noted that perhaps Tesla would be best if it focused on a few kinds, rather than using them all. The big questions, then, are these two: what kinds of anticipation and progress are there? And which kinds do we want to focus on in Tesla?

Tesla: Design Challenge 061715—Automation

We've been focused on capturing the overarching feelings of progress and anticipation for Tesla. But within these big-picture themes individual elements impose their own restrictions.

In particular, many of our visions have involved machines acting on their own, whether that means an assembly line that just chugs along or full-fledged artificial intelligence. Your challenge is to design something to capture this feeling of agency.

Tesla: Ascendancy

Last week we generated ideas for capturing a feeling of anticipation in Tesla's gameplay. Today I want to take a look at one in particular: jack's Ascendancy.

Tesla: Around the Corner

A couple weeks back we were discussing potential block plans for Tesla and Edison. We came up with numerous visions, but most of them shared a common thread: the progress made in Tesla has world-changing consequences in Edison.

But AlexC hit on something deeper than any one vision in his comment: the best way to elicit emotion from the players is to ensure that the advance turning everything on its head isn't just be something players see; it's be something they build.

Tesla: Promising Mechanics

In the time we've already spent designing Tesla we have come up with a truly stupendous number of mechanics to play with our progress theme and artifact focus.

This post is intended to serve as a repository of mechanics we're considering for the set. There are far too many to list, so instead similar mechanics have been collapsed down to a single exemplar: the implementation in that space that I find most promising.

Tesla Horizons: Look to the Future

In all of our time doing exploratory design for Tesla we've left one major area unaddressed. That's my fault because it's a high level consideration that I should have drawn focus to, but simply didn't notice. Thankfully, Inanimate caught my mistake.

Exploring mechanical space to hit our progress theme we've considered a truly staggering number of ways for things to improve, but never mentioned the other half of the emotional response we ought to be producing. Progress isn't just about getting better, it's about the apparently limitless potential that improvement represents. How can we make games of Magic feel like being on the cusp of something great? How can we evoke anticipation?