Open our Blox Fruits tier list and Leopard, Dragon, and Kitsune sit at the top of the S row. That ranking is correct. It is also not a shopping list, and treating it like one is how people spend a fortune in Robux to end up worse off than a player mainning a fruit three rows down.
The tier list answers one question: what's strongest. The question you should actually be asking is: what should I have equipped for the part of the game I actually spend my time in. Those are different questions with different answers, and nobody tells you that because "here's the #1 fruit" makes a better thumbnail.
You spend your time grinding, not duelling
Be honest about your playtime. For most players, PvP is a thin slice on top of a thick base of grinding levels, farming bosses, and getting from island to island. The best fruit for a clean 1-on-1 in the Colosseum and the best fruit for melting a crowd of NPCs are rarely the same tool. If you optimize your daily fruit for the slice instead of the base, you've made the game slower for yourself in exchange for being marginally better at the thing you do least.
Buddha is the case study
On our tier list, Buddha sits in A, not S. That's the right call for a blended ranking that weights PvP heavily, because Buddha in a serious duel is mediocre. But if your job this week is leveling, Buddha's giant transformation hitbox makes it arguably the most valuable fruit in the game, because it turns grinding from a chore into an assembly line. The grinding guide leans on it for exactly this reason. "A tier" and "the fruit that should be equipped while you grind" are not in conflict. The tier list is just answering a different question than your XP bar is.
The meta fruits are mastery-gated and trade-locked
Leopard is genuinely incredible — once you have the mastery and the combos in your hands. At level 800 with low mastery, it's a worse grinder than Buddha and a worse fighter than a fruit you actually know how to use. And for most people who get one, its real role isn't "daily driver," it's "trade chip." Look at what a Leopard is worth on the value list versus what you'd grind with day to day, and you'll see the gap. A top fruit you can't yet use is an asset, not a weapon.
Main what you'll actually use
If you grind: Buddha once you can afford it, and a cheap Logia like Ice or Light early on, bought with Beli rather than Robux. If you PvP: pick one strong fruit and put your hours into its combos instead of collecting the whole S row badly. Depth in one fruit beats a shallow rotation through five.
And remember the meta is not fixed. Blox Fruits has reset values and reshuffled the top of the list more times than I can count. Sinking real money into chasing this patch's number one is a bet that the number one won't move, and it always moves.
The tier list is a map of the territory. It is not the route you should drive. The fruit you should main is the one that makes the part of the game you actually play less of a grind, and for most players that fruit is sitting a couple of rows below the top, doing the unglamorous work.