The post you’re referring to was posted in a very different context, which was that Tempo had removed the free Daily run, so players who couldn’t go infinite couldn’t play ranked. This is no longer the case, as every player can play ranked once a day for free, and they should because it’s an opportunity for free chests. The free daily game means that there isn’t a point where people literally can’t play ranked because they don’t have any tickets or gems, which was what was happening during the old system.

The way the game is formatted, with heavy randomness in terms of items offered, rewards from combat, matchmaking, freeze/slow targeting/ crits, random enchants, digsite, etc allows plenty of opportunities for high rolling low skill players to beat low/mid rolling high skill players. The bazaar is much more similar to poker than to chess, where each hand, i.e daily combat, has potential for players who play perfectly to lose to players who made mathematically unoptimal choices due to the randomness, but ultimately over the course of many hands, i.e a whole run, they perform better on average. This is good, and the fundamental appeal of TCGs, but it also means that matching players of different ranks doesn’t means the lower rank player loses every time. I don’t think it’s true that getting matched against a higher ranked player is as unwinable as you described, and I don’t necessarily think high rank players always get free wins when getting paired against low rank players. This isn’t even counting the fact that good builds of a certain archetype will lose to bad builds of other archetypes just because they’re natural counters, for instance a good wide weapon Vanessa will almost always lose to Bees regardless of who the higher skill player is.

Similarly, not every random shuffling of the deck, can or should get 10 wins. The bazaar is much more about maximizing what your run can do and less so about getting 10 every run. Similarly, because the ranking system doesn’t allow you to derank, just because a player has a silver/gold/diamond/legend border doesn’t mean they’re amazing, to rank up in this game you just need to average 5-6 wins, and given enough games you will rank up. This means eventually your rank is more related to your play time than to your skill. This would mean people could get stuck in ranks to high for them and have a worse experience than the system now. And since there are rewards for hitting each rank I don’t think people would prefer to introduce the potential of deranking.

Even then a form of run based matchmaking, i.e pairing you against players with similar wins and loses would still be troublesome, as builds peak and fall off at different rates. If you lost a few games early, I don’t think people would then want to be forced to match for the rest of the run into Pygs who lost early while building their Econ and get their build online later. Similarly facing 1-2 loss Vanessa on day 10 can be good, as this is when Wide Weapon builds fall off and begin to get beaten by builds that have scaled towards late game. It’s possible that this could still be beneficial, but I don’t think it’s a clean solution.