The Big HearthArena Tierlist Overhaul

TL;DR

Arena has changed a lot over the past few years, and our tier list needed a major update to reflect today's meta. Over the past year, we created new tools, performed extensive statistical analysis, and reviewed over 1,500 cards with the goal of producing a tier list that accurately represents the true value of each card in the current Arena environment.

Hello Arena players!

In this post, we're diving into how Arena has changed over the years and how those changes have shaped our latest tier list update. After more than a year, we're finally able to give you this long-overdue update. Later in the post, we'll explain exactly why it took so long and what went into this massive overhaul. Arena now feels very different from a few years ago, shifting from big, slow cards to efficient, flexible tempo plays, where adaptability and smart decisions often matter more than raw stats. Here's a breakdown of the key changes we've noticed and how they influenced our tier list updates:

Big cards have fallen off

Large minions are much less valuable nowadays. Outside of some exceptions, if your 8-drop just "exists" without changing the state of play, it often feels like a wasted turn. Even big Rush minions aren't what they used to be. With boards filled with smaller minions, there are rarely high-impact targets for them anymore. Big cards now need built-in utility or immediate impact to justify a slot. Legendary groups often act as their own win conditions, reducing the need to draft other big cards. Smaller cards with Discover effects can also give access to big cards when needed, so including them from the start isn't always necessary.

Tempo is everything

Maintaining tempo remains the core of Arena strategy, but it works differently than it used to. Tempo is now less about trading efficiently on the board. Extra health on a 4-mana 4/5, for example, matters far less than it historically did. With Discover, Add-to-hand, and Draw effects everywhere, both players almost always have cards to play, so using your mana efficiently is crucial. Your hand functions as a versatile toolkit, and flexibility and smart decision-making now matter more than ever.

Small early-game cards, especially 1-drops, have become far more relevant. Previously, situational or conditional cards were often too weak to play, but now they frequently generate value, enable trades, or set up bigger plays. These low-mana cards help establish tempo, spend leftover mana efficiently, and prevent wasted cards due to hand size limits.

/Healing & Reach are both crucial

Healing, Armor, and Lifesteal help swing the clock in your favor, keeping you alive to stabilize or finish games. Reach, such as direct damage or burst, is also increasingly valuable. With players rarely running out of cards, finishing a game often requires extra damage rather than just board control. Taunts have become less impactful, while healing offers a safer and more reliable defensive tool.

The Long Journey

These changes made it clear that our hearthstone arena tier list needed a massive overhaul, a process that has been ongoing for more than a year. The reason it took so long is that adjusting a single card often affects the relative value of many others. When evaluating new cards, we always reference the existing scores, which now include over 5,000 tier score values. To update the tier list properly, we would either have to adjust all of them or develop smarter methods to handle the changes. This meant creating better tools, using more robust statistics to determine exactly where each card belongs, and improving the usability of the systems we rely on to adjust scores efficiently.

Previous statistical methods became unreliable due to frequent meta changes, evolving card sets, offering shifts, and short-lived features like Synergy Picks, all of which introduced immense noise. Developing a method resilient to these variables was crucial. Our new approach is now capable of accounting for meta shifts, offering odds, legendary groups, and more, giving us a reliable picture of how cards truly perform.

For the first time, we're also incorporating player behavior, looking at pick rates and seeing which cards players choose or reject despite our recommendations. This gave us enormous insight into where our previous assessments were off.

Using these new tools, we reviewed all 1,500+ cards in the current meta and adjusted nearly every single one. Many cards that were previously underrated or overrated are now properly positioned. After many hours of review and refinement, we believe this updated tier list is the most reliable reference available for evaluating Arena cards. Compared to using raw win rates, it reflects a combination of statistical analysis and practical experience, without the noise and inconsistencies that win rates alone can produce.

Up, up, up!

Power creep has pushed the entire Arena landscape upward. Since the internal system keeps tier scores from older cards for accuracy, the whole scale has had to stretch upward to reflect the new reality. What used to be great is now merely average, and that trend shows no signs of slowing down. To have the latests metas not have only cards in the left columns of the tier list, we decided to rebalance the tier list tiers as so:

Catering to Veterans

We are developing a new feature for veteran players. This will be a fully data-driven mode, where only the numbers speak and the judgment of our team or editors does not influence the results. The feature is built using the tools we've created to generate our internal statistical tier scores, which allow us to present meaningful data with much of the noise inherent to statistics reduced as much as possible.

Players will be able to explore and interpret the data themselves, using the tools to make their own decisions about which cards are strongest in Arena. Our goal is to make the information as clear and actionable as possible while still utilizing the insights we've gained on how to best approach raw statistics, making it easier to understand what the numbers truly reflect.

We hope to release this data-driven mode in the Hearth Arena helper app before the end of the year. Until then, if you haven't used our hearthstone arena overlay for a while, we'd love for you to give it another try and let us know what you think in the HearthArena Discord.

Good luck, and we hope to draft some great decks together.