[...] Well you should know about that in advance and schedule around it. And you being unable to find good subs is no excuse to not have them. Many players will backup in a lower div.

[...] This is really good to punish the lazy team leaders, but some teams might get extremely unlucky maybe because of vacations, exams or other real life stuff,in other words, things you can't prevent unless you have good subs, which is hard to find, since a lot of subs want to play in higher divs than they actually belong in.

... and in that case you got that one wildcard. We reduced wildcards to just a single one because many teams are too lazy to schedule actively, and more often than not would rather use their wildcards instead of trying to sort something out with the opponents. We are hoping to push teams towards active communication with each other instead of hiding behind rules and wildcards. Of course we are aware that some teams might get the short end of the stick - which you can counter by having sufficiently active backup players on your roster, or communicating merc issues with the opponents early. I am sure most teams wouldn't mind re-scheduling a game if possible within that same match week (which btw is the reason you should try to play all your officials as early as possible, and not always on Thursday of that match week).

Permzilla is suggesting you should've added players to your roster once you knew mercs wouldn't be allowed.

It's your own fault for asking for a merc 20 minutes before a match, a wildcard should literally only be for emergencies if you use it correctly. 1 a season is fine.

[...] Giving them time to find a more suitable merc, and if the team doesn't want to allow mercs then it's your fault for poor scheduling. There's always a reason.

They would have denied a merc whenever it was requested, surely?

[...] get stable players, learn to schedule