Starting Over - An Experiment

With the new gameplay options that have been incorporated into Splinterlands over the past couple of months and thinking about how it might effect newbies, I thought I would start an experiment to see just how long it takes for a new account to become viable with no influx of external capital. My guess is that it will take quite a while, but that's that experiments are for...to find out. Now, with me being close to a newbie (I generally play Bronze level matches), this should be a pretty fare assessment of just how long it takes. With that intro, let's see how things got started.

So, yesterday, I purchased a Spellbook for my wife's Hive account. Since I am aware that it is better to own cards than use starters, I began by purchasing some cards with my initial 3000 credits. I wanted to buy as many as I could (to build up my inventory/CP), but still get some that I would use frequently. I also know that you are most likely to win reward cards in your chests, so I skipped over those to focus on regular issue cards. Since most of the cheap cards right now are Chaos Legion (they are not out of print), those are the ones I ended up with. With this in mind, I was able to obtain the following cards:

Carrion Shade
Crypt Beetle
Deeplurker
Disintegrator
Gargoya Scrapper
Goblin Psychic
Hill Giant
Kulu Swimhunter
Lava Spider
Life Sapper
Mycelic Infantry
Mycelic Morphoid
Mycelic Slipspawn
Pelacor Arbalest
Radiated Scorcher
Regal Peryton
Scavo Hireling
Shadow Snitch
Silent Sha-vi
Stitch Leech
Sunkai Harvester
Tenyii Striker
Time Mage
Uraeus
Venari Knifer

I am a little deficient in the Fire and Water splinters for now, but I have a couple of useful Neutrals that will help fill in the gap. After one day, here are my numbers:

As you can see, I have not earned any chests so far, but have managed to work up into Bronze III league (as far as I can progress right now). Hopefully, I will be able to win enough FP/SP to qualify for a chest or two before the season comes to a close.

I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions as to how to pick up speed (besides adding funds to the account, of course...that would kind of defeat the purpose of the experiment). Until next time.