by JR Cook - 11 years ago     show comments

Behold: Gelbin Mekkatorque, leader of the gnomes. Look at this guy. Look at him! He is AWESOME!

In all the excitement about today’s updates regarding the Hearthstone beta, a small but significant piece of news was largely overlooked.

Players who try out the in-game card store during the closed or open beta will receive the golden Gelbin Mekkatorque card as a small thank-you from Blizzard for helping them test the store. While this may not seem super-exciting at first, there is an added bit of news: according to Community Manager Zeriyah, this will be the only way to obtain the golden Gelbin Mekkatorque card.

While other cards can be obtained in their gold version through a lucky draw in card packs or through crafting with an absurd amount of arcane dust, Golden Gelbin will not be available at all once the beta store closes. For serious gold card collectors, this may very well be the holy grail of gold cards, akin to the BlizzCon Bear for mount collectors. Mekkatorque can still be crafted or earned in purchased decks once Hearthstone officially launches, but it will only be the regular version of this card.

Once it launches,  testing out the in-game beta store will require players to spend actual cash. So far, the anticipated cost is approximately $1 for a pack of five cards. While Hearthstone is free to play and all cards can be obtained by playing without spending a cent, some players will still balk at the idea of spending any money on free to play games. And that is absolutely okay. There is no indication that Hearthstone will devolve into a pay to win state of gaming. Paying actual cash is just an alternate way for earning new cards.

Players who purchase cards during the beta will not be able to keep the cards they uncover when the actual game launches. However, for any pack purchased during the beta, players will receive the equivalent number of new card packs once the game goes live. If you do decide to give the beta in-game store a try, that delicious golden Mekkatorque minion will be yours forever.

Why did Blizzard pick Gelbin Mekkatorque? I think Xdega of Hearthstoneplayers.com put it best:

@CM_Zeriyah @NoxHearthstone Seems pretty obvious to me… Gelbin is an engineer. Engineers build, fix and TEST things. Beta TESTers get him.

— Xdega (@xdega121) August 8, 2013