Splinterlands Progress

I've completed 2 more quests now and feel that I know a bit more about the game than before. I didn't win any great prizes, unfortunately, or move up to a higher League.
The first quest was to win 5 battles with a Snipe monster.

I enjoyed it more than the Death quest since I get to play with different decks and familiarize myself with all the different monsters. I just had to play with the Death deck once again for the first battle in order to try out my new Undead Rexx card. I won the match, so I'm definitely a big fan at the moment. I tried out all of the Splinters after that playing Fire next (Lost), then Water (Lost), Earth next (Lost), and then Life (Won).
I experimented a little with strategies while playing. I picked them up from watching what other players were doing. So far I have found two pretty basic strategies for dealing with Low Mana caps. One is to just pick the best tank I can afford the Mana cost of and pair it with the Dragon summoner Drake of Arnak for extra protection. The other is to rely on a monster with the Dodge ability and pair it with a Flying monster. I'm happy with these so far and have had more winning streaks since I've started using them.
As before, I notice that other players have a big advantage from having better cards. Some that I went up against had all their cards leveled up to 2 or 3 stars. While mine were all 1 star cards. I'm thinking of just buying some decks and fixing that problem, but I kind of feel like that takes the fun out of things. For now I'm fine with losing and learning.
I didn't have any really long losing or winning streaks for this day after those first 3 losses while trying out the different Splinters. It was a mixed bag of a few wins followed by a few losses. So that's maybe a sign of progress. It didn't take me quite as long to complete this quest, either. My prize was 7 DEC and it brought my total up to 9.96 DEC for that day.

The next quest was to win 5 battles using the Life deck.

Apparently, I'm not so great at Life. I had my longest losing streak ever while trying to complete this quest. I think it may have been down to being in a hurry and also being mostly unfamiliar with the deck. I did eventually break out of the funk I was in and even had a few small winning streaks throughout the day.
My prize upon completion of the quest was more DEC.

I really wanted a card, but oh well. It was nearly double the amount of DEC I received for the previous quest, so at least I'm earning more as I go. My total DEC is up to around 30. I had hoped to be able to buy some potions with it or something, but it's not nearly enough. There is one thing I've earned enough DEC to buy - entry into a Tourney! I didn't even know there were tournaments when I joined, but now that I've found them I'm curious to try them out.
I'm still undecided on whether or not I should spend any more of my Litecoins yet. While it can be irritating to go up against players with leveled up cards, it hasn't been happening often enough to prevent me from completing quests or from moving up to Bronze League. It seems like it might be best to wait a while longer before I decide what to do about that. I'm tempted to buy some dice and curious about buying land, too. Trouble is I can't afford land and dice and still have enough left over to buy enough decks of cards to improve my game. I'll have to spend more time this week thinking about what might be the best investment and what I want most.