I take it this is going live February 1 with the conclusion of the current season?

This actually looks pretty decent.

I'm not sure what to think about these matchmaking changes. Making matchmaking be based on your rank in this ladder system.

The blog says that there will still be "safe points at the bottom of each rank", with which I guess they mean that you can't fall down to a lower rank if you are at 0 stars. It also says that the faster climbing through win streaks will still be there, too.

What that means is that it will be easy to climb and pretty much impossible to fall down. This was alright with the current ladder system, where being at field marshal rank just meant that you played a bunch of games, but it will potentially be a problem in this new system where your rank will influence your matchmaking.

Maybe you'll get a lucky streak and the win streak system will help push you some ranks upwards, but then you end up stuck there playing against decks that your deck can't handle, unable to drop back down, because of the safe spots at the bottom of each rank.
Or you climb a bunch with your main nation, but then you want to play a deck from a nation where you don't have many cards yet and have no chance to beat your matchmade opponents.

They should probably have the player's national progression level influence the matchmaking, too, because otherwise these two systems don't really sound like they work out well together. The national progression makes you specialise in one particular deck, making this deck stronger and making you climb the rank ladder. Then you want to play a different nation that you haven't specialised in at all, but you're still expected to play against opponents on the level of your main deck, because that's where your ladder rank is. That sounds pretty uncomfortable.

Best thing would probably be if decks themselves had a matchmaking rating attached to them, instead of just the player, but that's probably not easy to implement.

Nice changes. I get really tired of having to stop playing the nation/deck I want because I need to play other nations to get into OC every month.

Glad to see that pretty good change and I really like it!!!
(unlike your new resource system... sorry for my previous offence, but I still say wildcards sounds stupid, and I always want to repeat it here lol)
Today's game matching is not clarified enough for players. And I'm sure that was not fair enough before either, since I once matched with players of quite higher rank than me, even on top ten! while my score is below the entrance line of club, and for several times I swear! Thus, for a moment, I even guessed that your matching before only depends on whenever players play at the same time!
I thought previous matching system should simply have been according to our club scores, but it seemed not that simple. And I don't think the game matching should be influenced by any specific nation performance at all. (due to your imbalance among different nations actually...)
So I truly agree with your idea here of new matching and ranking system! Hope you can successfully make this come true right as you plan soon!

We appreciate the efforts, let's hope we'll appreciate the results.