Looks classic with a claret lion (the usual grumbles about the star, the 1874, and 'Aston Villa' being placed at the bottom aside).
Love it when we introduce gold to our badges, but, in this case, I think it would only work best on the kit while the bottom row-left would work best for anything with a lighter background.
(We already switch between white and claret borders for different contexts - the white was an awful choice, imo - so I don't see we couldn't switch between blue and gold.)