So my strategy was to read a couple of strategy articles to understand how the game actually worked. God, that was HARD. See, due to the nature of rewards of HIVE people are encouraged to create content about Splinterlands daily, but almost all this is "Battle of the day", "booster pack openings" and a lot of other content that aren't of any help at all for the new player.

Splinterlands Basic Strategies – Introduction – The Tank #01 the first actually useful, well written strategy post! I learned tons from that article, first that Splinterlands battles are more like Hearthstone: Battlegrounds or Auto-Chess than traditional CCGs.But after a lot of work I found @marianaemilia and her

Good, I got in, got my basic cards set and started playing to learn the game. Got in a couple of games and even completed the daily quest for a not so amazing reward at Bronze 3. So the conclusion was that the basic cards wouldn't let me ascend the ladder and as the rewards are heavily weighted towards the top leagues, fumbling with sub-optimal cards would only cost me money and time.

So I kept studying and found Steemmonsters | 31W-3L Beginner Deck Guide (Bronze 1 Rank in 70 Minutes) and this one was golden.

This guy gave me a setup, explained why there were in that order and what should I do with the changing rules of the game. Good! And it also was on the water splinter which is the equivalent of Blue in Magic, color that always has been my favorite color. So the next step was actually getting the cards.

It was already decided that I was going to rent the cards, it was really clear to me that the cards one uses as a new player are not the ones one uses when doing serious ranked play, so I didn't want to throw what little money I had on cards that I wouldn't use again.

I rented Alric Stormbringer lvl 1, Sea Monster lvl 1, Goblin Mech lvl 1, Cockatrice lvl 1, Grumpy Dwarf lvl 1, Crustacean King lvl 1, Cyclops lvl 1, Pirate Captain lvl 1 and Water Elemental lvl 1.

With this setup I managed to go in like four hours from bronze 3 to gold 1. Like a hot knife through butter. Also the rewards that day were way better than the bronze 3 ones. By that moment I was starting to grasp the card lvl mechanics and it was clear to me that to advance I had to upgrade the cards I was using. So I went back to Peakmonsters and rented a couple of death and earth cards aside from the higher lvl versions of my water cards to have flexibility because the splinter restrictions were appearing more often and having only blue cards was costing me more losses than in the lower leagues.