Why You Keep Facing Overleveled cards
The most frequent non-replay post on this sub is a post regarding overleveled opponents. Here is my explanation why this is the case and so many players face these overleveled opponents. As we know there has been inflation on ladder since 2019, which is actually the root of the issue. When you win, you win, you will earn about +30 trophies (It varies depending on your opponents starting trophies, but converges to +30). However, when you lose, you will lose a certain percent based off your league.
In theory, if you are "stuck" in a league, it is because you lose the same amount of trophies as you win. Since you don't lose the same amount per game, that means when you're stuck, you don't necessarily have a 50% winrate, its actually lower than that. For example, if you're at 5700 trophies, you lose 90% of what you would win. If you win 9 games, you would get a net of +270 trophies, but if you lose 10, you would get -270 trophies and be exactly where you started. You have the same trophy count as before, but 9/19 winrate or about 47.4%. Doing a bit of algebra, we can find that the winrate you need to stay in a certain league depends solely on the fraction of trophies that you lose when you lose a game. In January, SML posted an image of the percentage of trophies you win and lose. Using those numbers, I was able to generate this table. I left off anything below 4k and above 6k as you lose equal trophies to how many you win (+30/-30), which means that if you have a 50% win rate, you will end up exactly where you started.
The trophies column is the minimum trophies to have this specific loss trophy percent. Loss trophies percent means the percentage of trophies relative to 30 that you lose. (Lose 40% of trophies means -12 trophies for a loss). Win % represents the percent that you have to win to stay in the league.
How does this relate to going against opponents with higher cards? Say that you start a new account are at 4000 trophies. You will climb the more you play, until your winrate converges to a number around these in the table, which is how high you climb. If you only could climb to challenger 3, that means that you're winning 3 games for every 5 you lose to stay in challenger 3 (or else you would go up to master). What this means is that you're losing 5/8 games and the biggest cause of losses is overleveled cards. A healthy spot in a fair, elo based ladder (trophies are the elo rating) is where you win 50% and lose 50%. When you reach your peak, say challenger 3, and are winning 37.5% of the time, you are further than you should be. The #1 cause to losing a game of CR is card levels. When you are higher than you should be on the ladder, its because you've played a significant number of games and exceeded your "fair 50/50 place" on the ladder. This means you will go against stronger opponents, which almost always means higher level cards.
I have said on many occasions that ladder will converge to 50%. For players with a PB under 6k who play a lot, this is not the case. For this example, I will assume a perfect +30/-30. To make up for this, when there are players who climb exceptionally fast, they will have a winrate that is above 50%. Once you reach 6k and a 50% winrate will keep you stable, a slightly higher winrate is what pushes you to higher leagues. For example, if you play 300 games of ladder above 6k and win 155 out of the 300. You should be at 6300 trophies, with a winrate of 51.7%. If you play 300 and win 170, you will be at 7200, with a 56.6% winrate. However, if you played a hypothetical 20000 games you would have to win 10020 of them to reach 7200, which is a winrate of 50.1%. Ladder over 6k pushes you to down to 50%, but will never push you below 50%. Top players have win percents of slightly over 50% and the overall average if exactly 50% if you factor in the players who are stuck below 6k.
TL;DR You face overleveled cards when you play enough games to reach your true maximum for that point in the season, where you cannon exceed the required winrate to climb the league.