It was time to take a better look at my collection, particularly at the cards that I left out to be played in Survival Mode, after I carved out and marked as such my regular playing deck for Wild and Brawls.
I don't remember the exact number of cards it said I had available, but it was above 2300.
That sounds like a lot - and it is - but most of them were 1 BCX cards that I never leveled up and collected dust.
Sure, in Survival Mode numbers matter, but what's the point of having 10k level 1 cards if they can all get beaten by the same maxed out deck without losing any card?
I do have some strong cards in Survival too, but most of the 1 BCX cards were nothing but extra luggage that mostly have been carried around by the stronger cards.
Yes, they can take a hit instead of a card you don't want to lose, but they also take up mana.
So... I decided to consolidate them a bit to higher levels where they pick up better stats or abilities.
First part of that task I already accomplished, and that took the number of available cards for Survival mode from 2,300+ cards to 1,552 at the time of writing, with 13 in cooldown.
Before consolidating them and playing with the collection as it was (I also shifted some summoners around between Ranked/Brawls. Land, and Survival), in 19 battles I reached Bronze 3 and still 63rd on the Leaderboard, although the last battle was 11 hours ago.
Something interesting I noticed as I went through my collection to manage it was that I had a significant number of cards locked for 3 days without working on land. Many of those cards are maxed out. It is possible those cards were on land at some point and I removed them, but do they stay locked after removing them from land?
Normally, being locked shouldn't affect their ability of being picked up for Survival Mode, since there is a distinct switch that determines whether cards can play on Survival Mode or not, but it is something to consider... Personally, I unlocked them, to avoid any potential undesired interactions between the logic of the two switches.
I still have a lot of work to do on the rest of the collection, but tomorrow is a day too...
By the way, I have two custom sets defined. One with the Rebellion SB set, and one with my playing deck (minus Rebellion SB set cards). The reason for this is that I regularly need to upgrade SB cards, and I'd hate to mess up my main custom set (which I actually did once). By the way, did you know that if you update your card set after you applied some filters to it, it loses the selection of the filtered out cards after updating? I got burned this way once. This seems more like a bug than a feature...