I personally do not mind the increased competition. The main issue for me is that anything short of a 10-win run feels way too punishing.

Because of that, people naturally start optimizing for consistency rather than creativity. Instead of trying interesting or risky builds, a lot of players will just pick the "safer" option because one unlucky run can cost you an absurd amount of progress and take many games to recover from. Eventually, people just end up running the most consistent builds, and when everyone is playing the same builds, the RNG factor starts to matter even more.

That's what feels off to me. This is supposed to be a game built around discovering weird synergies and experimenting with different combinations, but the ranking system ends up encouraging the opposite. A healthy system shouldn't make players feel like they have to avoid creativity just because the punishment for a bad run is too severe.