It's definetely a game with many moving parts and it's constantly being updated.

The Hive posts can help, for sure! The sad truth is that blogging can pay much more than what Splinterlands can offer unless you literally put thousands of dollars into the game. If you can manage to have a small trickle of cash from your blogging rewards that'll help you just as much as playing daily. And it's not like the money is exiting the Hive block-chain altogether either so there's a nice synergy between Splinterlands and Hive there.

The draw of playing Ranked is not so much the money rewards, that are very limited, but the glint. Almost all reward cards are highly desirable and will make you much more competitive so there's some relatively plaesant and linear progression that you can look forward to if you play Ranked.

Anyway, if you're at the point where you can get Conclave Arcana packs from Frontier mode definetely keep playing that 👍

Also, this is not widely known but there's free tournaments that you can participate in where you can experiment against other players with ALL the cards in the game, you don't need to actually own them. You don't get any rewards but it's a nice way for a newcomer to scratch that itch of playing with fancy cards. They're called "scholar showcases", check them out 😉

Maybe stick to a Bronze budget for now and see what kind of gradual improvements you can do to round out your collection. But the shopping you did with the elf cards will already give you a boost, in the long term.