THE ESSENCE of Play2Earn is to make more than you spend, playing Splinterlands.

So, we want to MAXIMIZE our earnings- for each win.
While we MINIMIZE our spending, through rentals
All, while ensuring we win enough games to get to Silver to start bringing in the serious DEC.

The best way to maximize your earnings, on each win, is to use Gold/Alpha/Promo cards. EACH card with one of these attributes, gives you a +10% bonus to your earnings.

That may not seem like much but imagine a scenario where you have a Gold Foil Summoner and 4 Gold Foil monsters- that's an extra 50% on your earnings for each win. For every 2 wins, you get paid for 3.

The best way to get cheap rentals on these cards, is through PeakMonsters (PeakMonsters.com).

They have a lot of very powerful tools to help you find, rent and extend your rentals.

So, go to Peak Monsters--> Rentals
On the right side of the screen- you'll see a bunch of filtering tools: Edition, General, Rarity, Splinter... You'll want a Summoner, first, and we're only going to rent Gold cards so select those options. This limits the list, quite a bit, but there's still a bunch of cards we're not interested in so click on the column header 'Low Price'. NOW, we're talking! This view will show you the very cheapest, Gold Foil, summoners available.

For this example, I'm going to grab Pyre for 20 DEC/day
Since Pyre is a Fire Summoner- it's time to change the parameters of our search on PeakMonsters and rent some monsters for our deck.
Change from Summoners to Monsters, leave it on Gold on then select Fire and Neutral for your Splinters.
Now, your list shows all the Gold Foil monsters available for rent- from cheapest to most expensive. Now you just pick out a few of your favorite monsters from this list, without spending more than 20 DEC/day on them.

Some good monsters to get:

Ant Miners (.98/day), Flame Monkey (1.95/day), Spark Pixies (2.5/day), Flamesmith (1.1/day), Goblin Shaman (11.5/day), Serpentine Spy (14/day), Molten Ogre (Promo- 3.5/day), and Kobold Miner (Alpha- 27.5/day).
Finally, we need to go get one non-Gold card: Furious Chicken (10).
(Other cards to consider would be any other Ranged/Magic cards: Fire Elemental, Flame Imp, Goblin Fireballer, etc. as well as a Good tank- Living Lava or Pit Ogre)
That gives us 9 Gold cards to use in our decks, an Alpha and a Promo to throw in if we're able to as well as a Chicken- all for less than 100 DEC/day!

This will allow us to have a great, cheap, lineup:
Chicken, Monkey, Ant, Shaman, Pixies, Spy, Miner
We go first, we hit hard and we get +80% to our earnings when we win!
Higher mana caps would allow us to use the Molten Ogre and/or Flamesmith and any other Gold cards you decide to pick up.

This technique works for any Splinter

As long as you spend < 30 DEC/day on the Summoner (Vera at 3 DEC/day, for example, is a good start to a Water deck!) and < 20 DEC/day on monsters that you will use frequently- because, as you will notice when you play- Gold cards have another, HUGE advantage over regular cards (in addition to the payout bump): the Gold Summoners are L2, which lets you play higher level monsters and Gold monsters are a higher level than Regular monsters. This means that all your cards are going to to be, slightly, better than anyone else's (in Bronze) and will allow you to compete in Silver- where the real money is!

The Plan is:

Used Gold/Alpha/Promo cards to juice earnings to 50 Dec/win.
Use Gold level bumps to win more games, get into Silver and make more $$.

Play 25 games/day and win 12- covering rentals and pocketing a cool 500 DEC/day in profits.

I'm starting a new account and doing this, myself, if you are too- use my Affiliate Link (https://splinterlands.com?ref=axrho) and I can delegate a card to you while you start!
Follow and check back for status updates on my play2earn journey!