My first Gold League Tournament - Some guidance on how to level up.

Good morning everyone! Since we’re talking about tournaments, I’d like to share my first experience playing a Gold League Tournament.
I was hesitant at first, even though I was leveling quite a few of my standard cards up to Gold/Diamond – the cheap ones. Some of the legendary are just too expensive for now, and I’m still missing a few that I want for Silver League. But I have all of the Chaos League Rare Summoners at max level now, plus a lot of the cheaper cards, so I wanted to give the tournament a try – despite the 400 DEC. It went very well. First, how did I get there?

Level up gradually

My approach is the following – find the best cards by losing against them constantly. Wait for those to get to a decent price, and buy them. Getting better and better at Novice level. Repeat the same for bronze level – and watch out! The cards that were amazing at Novice, might to be as effective at bronze. Same goes for coming from bronze to silver – abilities change, stats change, strategies change.

Don’t be too afraid (This part I actually wrote before the tournament)

You don’t need to have all cards at the right level. I do fine in silver tournaments with having my most important cards on silver level – others are still bronze level or even novice, and still do their job as they should. I just paid the fee for my first gold tournament – I have the summoners and most of the most important cards that level – I will probably get chewed up, but also be spit out a lot wiser and with strategies for Gold level – which I can then use to help my guild in a Gold fray.

Mind your spending

Just because you got beaten up by Tofu 3 times in a row in a tournament, doesn’t mean you have to buy that card – it’s expensive. Rather find ways to circumvent it, or a strategy against it. Reflection shield works nice for example, or shield, or self-heal. Before spending money on new cards, see if there’s an easier way to avoid buying the card, but improving your strategy instead.

My first Gold Tournament

Now, how did the Gold Tournament go? Excellent. I finished 64th and made 246 SPS (around 2k DEC, 5x my investment). 11 wins to 10 losses, while 3 wins were due to forfeit - It seems like players are a lot more active in Gold, and not as many forfeit as in lower tier tournaments.

I noticed that the difference between Silver and Gold is actually not that much, since I also fought with Silver summoners and still was able to win, for example there:

Click here for battle 1!

The enemy had 3 cards at Gold level, 2 of those Legends and the Mercenary with self-heal, which can be very powerful. Still, my speed strategy with the lurker worked very nicely.

Here’s another one where (Click here for Battle 2!) I use Astral Entity at lvl2 to fight Keyla at lvl6. Still, the anti-melee strategy with evade and magic works like a charm.

As you can see, I also lost quite a few battles, some of them due to lack of Gold Legends (Tofu, Immortalis, Max Pruitt, Mantaroth, Iziar, ... for examples). But I don’t really care, I’m just mesmerized that I 5x my investment and did so well. And I have a few more cards on my radar, like Oshuur Constantia who I lost 3x against.

So, be brave, win or lose but always learn! Have a good day!