Hello, I'd like to make a CCG (collectible card game). I'm fine with all the offline programming for the game logic and whatnot. But I have no clue where to start for online stuff. My goals are this:

1) Have players be able to battle each other online via a matchmaking system which matches opponents of a similar rank

2) Have a ranking system similar to Hearthstone (you win, you move up in the rank tiers ex: rank 20 to rank 1)

Will I basically have to program these 2 online features myself, or is there an online service which provides me with a way to streamline this somehow? If I have to do all the programming myself, can someone provide me with a list of steps to achieve this? I'm completely new to online server-side programming.

You will have to program the actual game logic, the rules of your game, and how you expect persistent data about players to be stored and managed.

Platforms can provide things like account creation/login, matchmaking, leaderboards, and ranking.

Platforms for games you can look into include playfab, gamesparks, gamedonia, kinvey, app42, and many others. (Oh, wait, Kinvey just got bought by some enterprise thing, so probably not a good idea to go there for games now.)

And then there's the "hosted servers" like amazon lightsail, google compute engine, heroku, and many others. These are more to the metal (you get a database and a web request API and then build everything else yourself) but that also means you get more flexibility. Doesn't look like that's what you're looking for, though, so I'd suggest one of playfab, gamesparks, and gamedonia.

When all you need is leaderboards and matchmaking, AND you do this on mobile only, then you can use the Google Play services for Android, and the Apple GameCenter services for iOS. You won't be able to support cross-device-type play that way, though, but it's a low-cost alternative.