You check the rental markets and you are getting a heart attack on how much it cost?
This post then might be for you then it will suggest strategies to build competitive decks, on a budget.
I immediately applied a strategy of playing efficiently from the very first season and I have been sitting in Gold ever since, always playing at a disadvantage with a Silver level deck and massively gaining every season.
This means your cards will at maximum be level 5 common, lvl 4 epic, lvl 3 rare, lvl 2 legendary.
This applies to all monsters and summoners as a maximum for the league.
The rule of thumb is that if your summoner is 5-4-3-2 level in Silver you will have the ability to play monsters that are at a maximum of 5-4-3-2 and that is what you should strive to acquire/rent to play as efficiently as possible
If your summoner is a higher level than 5-4-3-2 it will be treated as a 5-4-3-2
If your summoner is a lower level than 5-4-3-2 then it will create a new lower cap for all your cards... you might not want that.
Lets again imagine you are in silver so the level limits are 5-4-3-2
You want to play a rare summoner: Vera
Vera is a rare card so her limit, in Silver, is level 4 and you see it will allow monsters that are 5-4-3-2 exactly the limit cap.
If you have a Vera that is level 4 you will have in Silver the ability to play monsters that are 5-4-3-2
If your Vera is level 5, in Silver your monsters will still be at maximum 5-4-3-2 because your Vera will be treated as a level 4
If your Vera is a level 2, in Silver your monsters will be at maximum 3-2-2-1 which will give you a significant disadvantage as other players, in the same league, will field higher level monsters
The first thing you want to determine is what level you want your cards to be.
This example will be for a Silver level deck (5-4-3-2) that will be extremely competitive in Silver even if offmeta and will do okay also in Gold even though will be significantly underpowered (in Gold you can play 8-6-5-3)
We will use peakmonster.com and usually try this filter
We will work on obtaining a set of melee/ranged cards which will be significantly cheaper vs the meta-magic version and leverage the speed of water to win games
Including also cheap dragon options we have, at today price, 5 possible summoners
Obviously different rules will mean different setups but in general you can imagine a setup like this for most games
Lets now look at great cheap troops for the different roles
In Water we have lots of amazing tanks.
Great usually cheap picks are:
You can of course also use neutrals like Goblin Mech.
As mentioned we have plenty of options. you don't need all of these you should just pick the ones you like the most.
If i were to pick 2 i would go for Sea Monster (all games except low mana) and Spineback Turtle (low mana)
it is good to have a couple of magic options like Ice Pixie or Sea Genie just in case.
I like to have 2 sneak or 2 snipe cards together
This is an all-melee game where Demented Shark is King
My opponent decided to use all the mana points but in doing so he is very defensive and can attack only with the Kraken, the Sand Worm and 1 ranged with the WarChaang.
My setup instead have all slots attacking except the Demented Shark.
I have 2 opportunities and 1 sneak which are currently countered by the Kraken
Finally, i have WarChaang in last position for the possible retaliate
In Round 2 the kraken is already dead and i expect my opportunity monster to decimate the opponent
In Round 4 the game is already decided
Here we have a typical setup (bronze cap tournament) with the Sea Monster as Tank, Wave Runner as offtank/dps. Sea Shark as DPS. Venari WaveSmith as utility, Crustacean King as healer and finally the chicken just to soak damage
Its a well fought match but i am able to dish out more damage and the game is starting to move in my favour by eliminating the ranged dps of the enemy while keeping my all team (except the chicken) alive till now.
We will now both lose the healers but my tank is in much better shape
And the game is now over
I do have a growing collection of cards but until recently the vast majority of my cards are rental.
By playing off-meta with rentals of 400 Dec a day I have 6 splinters I can play competitively in Gold 2. on average i win 10-15 games a day which give me around 1000 DEC
This is what i am renting, today, its 102 cards across all splinters.
If you were to start from absolute nothing I reckon with just renting 10 cards you can have a competitive water deck, in silver, costing you less than 50 DEC/Day with rewards of 10 DEC/day+ for each win that can become 30 DEC/day if you reach gold3
