Oh! For Special Tiles there wasn’t that much discourse as the effects landed to be somewhat comparable to each other right off the bat. I do remember arguing with tarakanoed about Smithy, saying it might be a bit too good, and there were doubts about the Windmill, as it’s the only meta card in the cycle.
For Monsters, however, we were opting into more and more complex designs with each one (Beholder is one of the survivors of that period), until ultimately someone pushed for a batch of simple guys to keep it easier to understand.
Dark Whirlpool for one caused a lot of pain to our programmers, to me, the artist (drawing spirals is hard), and to all of us collectively during playtesting as they would just mess up our test environments. It’s grown to be a love-hate relationship in the end xd
Glad you enjoyed our lil game!