Grinding used to be necessary if one was to rank high in the old leaderboard. I was the highest scoring player in two seasons. Believe me, grinding all the way to number one was extremely exhausting, as I was required to get 500,000 scores to achieve that. Suppose a 300 vs 300 win got me 900 scores, I needed to win 550 games, or play 800 games with a 70% win rate. It was even more demanding than a day job!
And when I was grinding, I needed to use quick decks that won or lost within 9 turns, which strictly limited my play style. Very sorry to say that I also needed to early quit if the opponent was a bad matchup, as I needed the time to fulfill that 550-win requirement. I could not enjoy the game anymore because I cared too much about the scores.
So after two seasons, I stopped the crazy grinding and ranked around 50 by playing the game naturally. I thought I might never go back to top 10 again as I did not like grinding.
And then came the new ranking system.
One good thing about the new system is that grinding is absolutely not necessary for a player to rank number one, as shown in the current ranking as of Oct 2017. It is perfectly possible for the best players to just play 50 games or even less and rank high. Those 800 games a month period is long gone.
In the new system, the highest score one can get should be (350 x 350 / 100) x 50 = 61250, provided he is strong and lucky enough to have a 50-game winning streak against fifty 350 rated players, which is very unlikely. Most people can only get as high as 30,000 by winning 30 out of 50 games against other 300+ players. So climbing up the leaderboard is not about how many games one need to win. It is strictly about win rate, i.e. a player with 80% win rate will naturally rank higher than a 70% one and the latter can never surpass the former unless he improves the win rate. And win rate is a fair method to judge how good a player is.
And even latecomers can challenge the leaderboard now because the head start does not matter much. It is theoretically possible for a player to appear out of nowhere in the last week and climb all the way to number 1 after 50 games.
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