Personally I would rather see more different types of game modes instead of artificial league borders squeezed into the existing ones. The system as it was, was really bad, not being able to use the level of cards you had at your disposal, getting punished for using cards of insufficient level, even though they were the better choice. But I think many calling for the old leagues are disregarding that this system was in place when there were tons of player bots active and we might not have the playerbase to support a split into more leagues.

That said, the card level discrepancies are certainly not a good thing and there should be an option for players who choose to stay on lower card levels to only compete with players of similar card levels. I know tournaments do that, but specific tournaments are few and far between. On the other hand, if you look at the frontier league, it is nice to create an equal playing field where everyone starts with the same cards and it develops from there, free of bots and still working out nice from what I can tell.

I think this could be explored as an alternative to previous leagues. If something like this could be replicated for bronze, silver and gold it would be nice, a sort of rule-based league. I think the tournament rewards pools could fund such experiments if a couple of the less popular tournaments are cancelled. You know, those where player numbers don't even exceed the prize rankings and people basically buy SPS for cheap with DEC...

I would suggest this over messing around with the ranked system that has a number of other problems, create a month long running tournament league, maybe some small entry fee, no prizes per match, just fight for rankings, like with an actual tournament. If there are doubts that players would play it without prizes per match, throw in a pack every 100 wins or whatever. That way you create a place where players can compete at their chosen card level, which is the main gripe with the league removal and at the same time new content is created, only at the cost of certain tournaments which see so little attendance that they become cheap SPS sales.