Popular streamer and Hearthstone community personality Octavian "Kripparrian" Morosan was one of many community figures present at the Hearthstone Winter Championship, which took place in Nassau, Bahamas.

That trip, he said, represented the only vacation he's had for a while. So rather than keep him off the beach for too long, we spoke briefly with Kripp about the upcoming Year of the Mammoth, how recent changes have affected Arena balance, and why the game is better when there are combo decks in the mix.

Obviously we're going to have fewer cards in Standard then we've had for a while, when this flips over we lose all these sets. If you could keep one card in standard, what would you keep?

Anyfin Can Happen. Because they've got the Dinosize thing and so it seems like a similar style of play. But Anyfin Can Happen is one card that defines a deck, and it's one of those decks where you need the Warleaders, you need the Bluegills. But it's a deck type that has 24 cards open, and that's very unusual these days. These days it's like 'Okay, I want to play Jade Druid. 28 cards. Okay, now I get to put the cards I want in.' So it's one of those rare semi-combo, semi-control archetypes that is rare enough on its own and it's a very open deck type. I was playing a version of it the other day and I didn't have peacekeeping effects, forgoed those for more card draw. It's very, very open and I like those types of decks a lot.

We had all these cool Burgle mechanics for Rogue in Gadgetzan and then it was like, 'Oh by the way, you're playing Miracle Rogue again, except now you have two Swashburglars.' So do you think that maybe we need to start rotating more stuff out of Classic to have a larger variety of decks in standard?

I don't know. There's deck types that just kind of just kill deck variety. I mean, the fact that there's so many crazy powerful aggro decks makes it so, if you're playing Rogue, I would have to be a better aggro deck which is very hard to do. Or you would have to have a deck that just kills everything else, and there's Miracle Rogue, which kills all the control decks. If there can be a more healthy balance between deck types — so if the ladder's like, a few aggro decks, a few midrange decks, a few control decks ... these cards that seem good but just get meta'd out essentially, I think will start coming back eventually.

So yeah, I think that's what we experience with the Burgle mechanic and not just Rogue, a few of the other classes just get swept out. Hunter's a pretty obvious one, like, Hunter's deck type is aggro. They call it midrange, but it's a midrange deck where you want to kill your opponent on turn eight or nine. The reason we don't see Hunter is because it plays like the other aggro decks, but the other aggro decks are faster, so it just gets totally outed by those decks. And Rogue's a bit more dynamic because it has a few more deck types, but those deck types, again, just get marginalized in that same way.

When the change to Arena where we could only use standard cards was announced, if I remember correctly, I thought you said that you thought it would be a good change.

Yeah, and I think it is a good change. I have played quite a bit of Arena since then, and I still don't think I fully understand everything. There's a few things that I thought would get fixed that I was a bit too optimistic about. Overall, the main thing I don't understand, just to clear up that point, is how people get such insane decks. I mean, you'd think that there is bell curved decks, that you generally get a deck of a certain quality and anything that is slightly better than that becomes less and less likely. And I look over at the decks that I played, I had two, maybe three really good decks this month out of like, 30, 32 arenas something like that. And even with those decks I was playing better decks.

Every time I'm at eight wins they have a much better deck than I have ever had. I played a guy, thought he had the best deck ever, then he posted his deck list and I thought he had three Dragonfire potions, he had six. These decks that I'm seeing are so, so far beyond what I've ever drafted I just don't understand how that happens. Someone the other day posted literally Reno Mage on reddit. He had two Kazakus, he had Reno, a bunch of other legendaries, Firelands Portals, Blizzards. How do you get there, when overall the actual Arena deck quality went lower, right? I kind of just face a few of these guys every now and again and I just get slaughtered, like I had no chance here.

The other aspect is with the big increase of spells. The rarity thing was really cool, I think the increase in epic cards and rare cards is... you just see more cards, and that alone is just really cool. I don't think it could have been, in any way, bad. It ended up being that way, so that met expectations. The other big change was they increased the number of spells by a lot. I thought that would be a really good change because most of the frustrations I have in Arena are the inequalities between first versus second. Like, in low-end Arena, if you go second, even with an aggro deck, you are going to face a lot of bad decks, a lot of mediocre players and you're just going to win anyway.

But when you're playing good players with good decks, going second with an aggro deck is like a death sentence. So I thought that would kind of be reversed, because the few times I would win my opponent would try to tempo out one drop, two drop, three drop, four drop, going first which is like, 'Oh my god.' But then if you have a big board clear you can come back and those are actually the few games you win. So if I have more spells it seems like that situation is more likely. On the other hand, if every deck is comprised of more spells, having a perfect curve of minions is less likely for the proactive player.

Well, it turns out that it didn't help that much. Turns out if you go first and you have a one drop, two drop, three drop, four drop, you kind of automatically win. Because the moment you have a big taunt minion, now they're so much likely to have removal for your comeback play. So even though the advantage of going first is not as big, because both players including the player who went first have answers to things, when you go second and you finally use your coin for a big power play, you usually lose that to a spell.

So it kind of screws both sides and it hasn't improved that very much. But, to be fair, the way they set it up and the timing of it has been pretty good. We had one month of standard, now we're going to have three to four or five months of the new standard, which eliminates a lot of sets. Possibly all of these things can go away with a smaller card pool with completely different cards.

So basically what I"m saying is, it didn't get much better than the previous case. [Blizzard] is pretty open with their design philosophy, like, 'Let's just try it and see what happens.' So I wouldn't blame too much for that. But it's basically a brand new state of arena when the next expansion hits and standard rolls over. So we basically get to see how that is. And that is, in my opinion, very isolated from the current state.

Whatever criticism we have of Arena right now, I think we can just disregard those and just fully explore the new set when it comes out.

Mage was considered by many to be one of the strongest arena classes before this change, do you think this remains true after the changes?

HearthArena had their tier list of classes: like 4 million arena games played. So that's fairly conclusive. And they said that it was Rogue at number one, Warlock at number two, and then it was Mage and Shaman, I believe, tied for third or something like that. And I believe that Warlock was the best in the prior Arena block ― so like Mean Streets without Standard ― so we had about three months of that, and during that I believe Warlock was the best.

Best means: most consistent results. So that is different from a lot of what you tend to see at high wins a lot of the time.

I do feel throughout the entire history of arena, the most unbeatable deck has been Control Mage. So what that means is, the deck that's going to likely kill you in the end is a really good control deck, but that doesn't mean that Mage is the best class to pick in Arena because it's not actually going to give you the best results overall, where Warlock, and apparently Rogue right now, will.

So it's still a bit of a mix. When you're considering these factors it means that balance is generally pretty good. So it means that yes, while Warlock or maybe Rogue is the best class, Mage is not far behind, Shaman is not far behind. I feel class diversity has been quite good in Arena since Gadgetzan. A few of the other issues have gotten worse, like first vs. second and the deck quality mattering a lot.

But in terms of class diversity, it has been actually spectacular since Mean Streets of Gadgetzan.

Josh "Gauntlet" Bury is a news editor for theScore esports. You can find him on Twitter.