In this post I would share my starter pack strategy for all novice Splinterlands players. This is not about providing you winning card combinations - as almost all set-ups can be countered - but rather a way on how you can start the game at any time and get to at least Bronze 2 or higher without buying more then a spell book.
0. Play a few games without buying the spellbook
First and foremost try out your own combinations and see if you can win in ranked battles. This is possible on the mobile app. You will see how effective you are and understand the cards a bit better. How attacks and defense work, what are some special abilities (like fly, retaliate, sneak or snipe...) and for a lot of them there are % chances for success. definitely read up on them. Splintercards is a great resource, where you can select the ability icon you are interested in, you see it's description below and also the cards which can have the ability! :)
Pro tip: the speed of a card does not only define which card goes first, but faster cards have a chance to dodge melee and ranged attacks (not magic). The chance is the 10% times the speed difference between the defending cards speed and the attacking cards speed. For example: A card with speed 4 has a 20% chance to dodge a melee or ranged attack from a card with speed 2. Keep this in mind when choosing Pyre as your summoner ;)
Your learn the most, when you fail. That is often true in life, and here it is not different. I try to utilize my losses and enhance my strategies in 2 ways.
1. Keep track of the losses
At the start I had no idea what a card can do. I thought I had a good team with a tank and a few cards which targeted the back lines but had to find out that sneak, snipe and opportunity can all target different enemy cards and as such I was just damaging the enemy cards instead of killing them...
I decided to rely on the experience of the other players.
The bronze league is perfect for this as there are no games with special rules. This means that you can focus on the mana and the splinter(Death, Dragon, Earth, Fire, Holy, Water) combination of your cards.
I have created a spreadsheet where I logged what teams defeated me, and then tried out those same teams against other players. The table can look something like this:
The horizontal color coding helps to find out which team to choose (X - this team is strong against that splinter, 0 - The team is weak against that splinter, - winner can be any of the teams).
The vertical color coding helps when you are assembling your team as I lost the line multiple times when I was creating the team.
With this strategy you will slowly get a feel of the current strategies, you will understand which cards synergize, as you see them being played on multiple mana levels and don't have to memorize all of your card plays when playing for the daily quests :)
2. Use helpful tools
A few days ago 
On the website you can enter your Splinterlands in game name (IGN) or any other players IGN and see the games they played in the past. What is even better is that you can click on any of the battles and change your team structure and press battle. The site will try to simulate 100 battles with the chosen setup, and calculates the possibility to win in percentages. The site is still in Beta, but check it out. Leave them a few Hive, if you think their project is good. 10% of the total earned Hive on this post will also go on their account!
Check out their giveaway and an overview of their tool HERE
3. Look for giveaways
A lot of players offer giveaways. You can find some on the Splinterlands Discord Channel on PeakD.com, Splintertalks.io and on hive.blog. At least these are the once I know of ;)
Try to join as many as possible, but please be aware, that on HIVE supported community platforms you will need Resource Credits (rc) to reply/upvote. Some players may also delegate cards for you for a short time, so you can try them out!
These are also used to do transactions in the Splinterlands game. The RC is slowly restored, and after 5 days you will recover all of it.
If you need RC fast, then you can ask someone for RC delegation at the official Splinterlands discord channel: https://discord.gg/CAFJRjY under the section #rc-issue-request. RC will regenerate over time, but it is better to have some Hive delegated to Hive Power in your wallet. This is unfortunately out of the scope of this post.
After a few days you should have won your daily quests and earned a few DEC, so you can rent your first cards 😎
In case you haven't played the game yet, then feel free to reach out to me with your questions. You can use my referral code as well: https://splinterlands.com?ref=arkasz
Let me know if you do so and I will try to help you out in the beginning phase a bit more maybe with some DEC, or delegating a card ;)