So I just wrote an article on how to get out of bronze, and it was quite hard. I continued onto silver, and within an hour, I pass through into gold. It was actually much easier than bronze, so I thought I'd write a quick guide, since I think it would be rather fast, haha.
Since this guide about doing it on the cheap, I definitely didn't use one of the predominant strategies of Scarred Llama Mage and Kron the Undying, as they are kind of expensive to rent. That setup was usually my worst enemy when ranking up, but also, when the enemy plays it, they've usually played it in the past 5 games as well and you can prepare your team for it. I usually went too fast to notice when it would be played, but the one time I did, I set up a lot of sneak monsters and killed the Kron before it was the last one standing.
Other than that, I primarily used Ilthain and Aquatus as my main summoners and Owster Rotwell as a close secondary. They are surprisingly effective and in the silver rank, there usually aren't enough restrictions on the splinters to disallow all three of those corresponding splinters. (Life, water, and death). I did use dragon quite a bit, but usually only on the high mana matches, and really only because I had lots of high cost cards in there.
The tips I followed to get through silver were much more relaxed then in bronze, but I'll try to write them all down here.
Spreading Fury Ruleset: Play Aquatus + Coreul Lurker
Thorns or Reflect Magic: Play Ilthain
Thorns or Return Fire: Play Owster Rotwell
I didn't use fire or earth at all and didn't need to rent any cards from those splinters. Dragon was used much less than in bronze. Agor was definitely less effective than in bronze.
When playing life, a good standard tank setup I played was Pelacor Conjurer and Blinding Reflector
Cornealus came in handy in many matchups and was one of the few expensive cards I rented.
Uriel the Purifier came in handy in many poison rulesets and as a front end tank with Coreul Lurker in the back.
Sand worm was good at countering the Llama by killing the intended last stand monster.
Prismologist won me several rounds.
Pleacor Arbalest was pretty useful.
Upgraded Cursed Windeku was pretty useful.
Magi of Chaos won be a couple rounds.
Grandmaster Rathe came in handy in a few rounds, but didn't feel like he was completely necessary like Ilthain and Aquatus were.
Overall, the enemy lineups were unimaginative once again. They may be mostly bots, since they rarely ever play the new Riftwatcher summoners or monsters. Predicting them to play "typical" old school lineups using mostly Untamed summoners and cards was usually correct and countering them could be done pretty easily by looking at their history.
I initially started by renting a bunch of cards to try and figure out the meta, and I believe I ended up buying a lot more than I needed to, so I'd recommend looking over the tips above before renting your cards.
Once again, I end with some stable diffusion character rejects :)
