Since Hearthstone's inception, it's been a matter of public record who the game's best constructed players are. The Hearthstone Championship Tour, unofficial tournaments, and of course, the monthly climb to Rank One Legend proves who the most skilled (or certainly consistent) players in the world are. But the same isn't true for Arena, the drafting format that often feels like Hearthstone's red-headed stepchild.
Depending on who you ask, it's long been considered, assumed, or debated that Octavian “Kripparian” Morosan is the best Arena player. He's certainly the most well known, streaming his laid-back and sometimes salt-filled Arena runs nightly for tens of thousands of viewers. But up until now, there's been no definitive stat Kripp or any other prominent Arena player could point to.
Blizzard recently announced that it would be tracking Arena wins and releasing a monthly Top 100 leaderboard, based upon players' average wins per run, with a minimum of 30 runs. The first leaderboard was just released, and sure enough, Kripp secured the number one slot.
"I've always felt that the few hundred top players in Arena are about as good as one another," Kripp said when reached for a statement. "Despite that, it seems I've had some well timed streaks of luck to make it in the top spots on Blizzard's Arena ladder. It feels great to have some validation as whenever I try to talk about my issues with the game, there are always those that doubt my ability to play it."
Funny enough, the debate may still be out on whether or not Kripp is really and truly the best. The list above is only the leaderboard for the North American Hearthstone server. The European server, on the other hand, has the player twelvewins in the top spot, with an average of 9.32 wins—much higher than Kripp's 7.78. The last time Blizzard released some statistics about the Arena—tracking data over a nine-month period—Kripp and twelvewins secured the titles of most 12-win runs and most total wins, respectively.
Interestingly, 13 of the top 100 spots on the NA leaderboard are occupied by players with "Meow" in their name—four in the top 10 alone. It's a bit unclear if these accounts are related, all controlled by a single person, or something else entirely. However, according to a Reddit post, the Meow accounts belong to an "Arena fan group" of Chinese players who collectively migrated to the NA servers when the Chinese server broke down for several days.
In a recent livestreamed Q&A, game director Ben Brode and game designer Dean Ayala said that changes could be coming to Arena in the (near-ish) future, such as switching the game mode to the Standard format, which only features the four to six most recent card set expansions, as opposed to the entirety of Hearthstone's card pool as it does now. Other changes could involve tweaking the draft portion of Arena, possibly reducing the appearance rate of common cards and neutral minions, or boosting the appearance rate of spells.
It remains to be seen if and when those changes will make it into the game. Either way, the second month of Arena tracking is now underway, so we'll see if Kripp can again secure the top spot.
