tl;dr Change casual Duels from “play until you lose X” to “how many wins can you get out of Y rounds.”
I am a bad player. This means I am rarely able to progress to the later rounds of Duels.
This creates two problems:
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Bad players like me rarely get to experience the higher health total and bigger decks of the later stages of Duels. Instead, we mostly only play the earlier rounds.
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As a consequence of 1, there are significantly fewer players playing in the later rounds. This makes MMR-based matchmaking more difficult. And in the future, meta in later rounds of Duels may also become staler as most non-meta decks cannot reach these rounds before they are eliminated.
With Arena and its entry fee, “play until you lose X” has its appeal from a design perspective. It makes the bad runs less painful and the good runs last longer. Otherwise, players with a weak deck may feel that they are “stuck” with the deck as they try to get more wins to max out the return from their entry fee.
With casual modes having no entry fee, players who feel that they are having a bad run can always start anew without worrying about the entry fee paid. And bad players like me should be allowed to progress to and (probably lose) in the later rounds of Duels.
I propose changing casual Duels’ from the current “play until you lose X” model to “how many wins can you get out of Y rounds”. This allows bad players like me to experience the later rounds of Duels, whilst making matchmaking in later rounds more healthy as there will be more players and greater variance of deck quality.