Currently, if you have a lot of money, it IS trivially easy to be in champion. That is what the whole post was about.

As I read your comment, it strikes me . . . . "Yeah, he really did do it the hard way rather than the smart way. He should have just taken his first two season's winning, bumped a bunch of his cards to level 3 and just coasted."

This is because of the poorly-playing bot flood.

My collection's quality hasn't changed much since I got over the diamond wall (in terms of percentage of cards maxed -- it has changed/grown substantially by the addition of Untamed).

Once I got over the wall, Diamond I was pretty easy but progress from there was slow. It took me months before I reached Champion II and finally Champion I. These days, if I'm not Champion II in the first three days of the season, something is wrong.

Now, granted, my play has gotten a lot better. I've made Top 50 half of the last half dozen or so seasons. But in the first day or two of the season, I'm seeing decks in Diamond I and Champion III that never would have made it past Silver III.

So, yes, it is still a lot tougher to make Champion with bad cards. But it was literally impossible before there was a decent quality of play and players actually needed decks roughly equivalent to the league level.