I have over-snapped!
I threw myself into this pretty hard Tuesday and Wednesday, and I’m sure there’s still a lot more that I don’t know than what I do know, but I think I’ve hit the point where there’s almost nothing to do without spending (more) money. But that’s probably a good thing.
I’m CL 111, rank 28. I just finished my 25th mission, so I’ve satisfied the weekly challenge (complete 25 missions) with another four days until that resets.
The individual missions refill 2 every 8 hours. I’ve got one I could knock out, and probably will when I play around lunch later today. Those are pretty easy to keep up with a few matches a couple times a day. You can pay 150 gold to immediately get 2 new missions, and I’ve done that a few times, but there’s a cap. I wasn’t paying close attention, but I think you can only do this three times a day? Whatever the cap is I hit that yesterday. So even if you were tempted to try to dump money into the game to keep advancing missions (a good way to get credits, which will often be your bottelneck for advancing your collection), knowing there’s a limit will curb my temptation to spend real money to buy gold to buy missions to grind credits. That’s a good thing!
Season Pass missions are time gated too, and I’m “caught up” on those right now with the exception of one mission for upgrading cards–something I’ll ineveitably knock out.
So now I’m just trying to upgrade all the cards in my collection to Uncommon. That first upgrade costs 25 credits (plus the required card-specific “booster” currency) and adds 1 to your CL. All the subsequent upgrades until the last one are more expensive and the math works out to costing you 50 credits per CL (for example from Uncommon to Rare costs 100 credits and adds +2 CL), so if you’re trying to optimize credits spent toward increasing your CL, getting all your cards to Uncommon before you run out of credits to spend is ideal. I’ve got probably a dozen cards left in my collection that are still Common, so I can slowly grind for boosters for those specific cards, but that’s just (slightly weighted) luck, and in most cases at this point involves putting Uncommon cards into my deck that don’t really fit with the rest of my build. So that’s slow going, but not frustrating.
I’ve spent $13 total: I bought the new player bundle for $3 (or whatever it’s called) that includes Captain America and some gold at a pretty steep discount compared to buying gold directly. Mostly I did that for Captain America, and despite having put some of that gold to use refilling missions as described above, I still wouldn’t really recommend this bundle unless, like me, you also just like Captain America. And I spent $10 for the Premium Season Pass, which means I get rewards at every Season Pass level instead of only occasionally if you’re playing the Season Pass for free (also available is $15 for the Premium Season Pass plus an immediate 10 level boost on the Season Pass, which didn’t seem like a good value).
Depending on how much I get out of the Season Pass, I’ll consider buying future Season Passes, but I don’t see any reason to put any more money into the game. But I expect all of this info to be out of date a month from now when they rebalance all the currency and change everything up, as these games inevitably do. Bottom line, I’m enjoying this, but I put more time into it than I should’ve in the first couple days so I’m slowing down.