Designing new cards for digital card brawler like Hearthstone isn’t easy, and changes are bound to happen before the final release.
It turns out that the whole Jade Golem idea used to look a lot different. In its final form for December’s Mean Street of Gadgetzan expansion, certain cards for the Rogue, Shaman, and Druid summon a Jade Golem. The first Jade Golem is a 1/1 minion, but the second one would be 2/2, then 3/3, and so on. But it didn’t always work that.
GamesBeat interviewed senior game designer Peter Whalen, and he talked to us about a very different version of this Jade mechanic.
We iterated an enormous amount on it. We had an idea early on that as you played jade cards, jade cards got better. The very first version we had was — you had a jade count on your hero, and you had a bunch of cards that…