Reaching Diamond I a week after starting playing splinterlands (rental system is great)

So I had been playing the game for a day and was in bronze III when I stumbled with this challenge in discord:

I took the challenge and almost managed to reach Champion III! (reaching a new league is hard since at tier I of your league at least half of your oponents have less rating than you, so they give little rating for beating them, and you lose A LOT OF RATING if they beat you)

Even before claiming the season rewards I was sitting over more than 5k DEC, and a few cards from loot chests, so I realized two things:

• It could definitely be worth pushing for higuer leagues with just rental cards even if I wasnt going to get the reward from the challenge
• Not only I got back my initial investment (since I started with 1k DEC and used a lot of it on my way to diamond) but I didnt used a lot of the cards I rented and some of my strats for climbing and team comps were suboptimal or even not good, wich means it could be posible to climb from bronze to at least diamond with way less DEC!.

After finishing the challenge the guy who posted it asked me to do a post here about my experience, so I will try to share some advice and useful tips (or at least I hope you find them useful)

• If you are just starting out or stuck at bronze you probably dont have DEC to rent you a fancy deck with legendaries and the like, but you dont need them! of course they could improve your win rate, but there are some AMAZING team comps with common and rare cards only that could improve your winrate a lot

• Sometimes less is more, if you are still a newbie and get yourself a few but reliable cards for one or two splinters (and neutral too of course) that means that you have less cards to choose from, but since you are new to the game and those cards are good, thats better! the more cards you have to choose from, the harder it is to build a good team comp if you are not a very experienced player

• The meta (best cards and team comps) is diferent in each league, but furious chicken and creeping ooze are always great fillers (sometimes creeping ooze is good even in mid-high mana matches since speed is important)
  

• You wont be able to reach the top without a lot of experience and skill, but knowledge alone can carry you really far, make sure to get yourself familiar with most interfaces and menus in the game and with the cards (specially abilities, knowing them and how to use them properly is a must in gold league and beyond)

• Do your research, there are a lot of great sources of info out there, like the wiki, other guides here in peakd, splintercards,com, pinned messages in the official discord or other splinterland servers, etc

• If you lack Card Power (CP) to reach a higuer league/tier, gold foil cards are the best to get cheap CP, use this chart to help you, and when renting sort for price, the encircled column is the CP that almost all the cheapest gold foild cards provide
  

• Make sure to get very familiar with the rental sorting options, you will need them! (also peakmonsters is a bit harder to use, but more convenient to manage a lot of cards, and it allows you to renew rental contracts!)
  

• Again, I dont recommend you to rely too much on legendaries, if you find yourself a really cheap and useful one to rent thats fine, but most of them eat almost or even more DEC than you gain in a day, and they wont get you too far if you dont use a good team comp with them, use them with caution

I think thats everything, i hope something in this post could be helpful to you, good luck and thank you for coming to my TED talk