Splinterlands: How big are my chances to invest in Chaos Legion packs and what are my options?

Hello everyone,

with increasing excitement, I am counting the days until Chaos Legion will be released. I am a small fish in the game (BronzeI/SilverIII player), but I planned to invest a small amount of money (around $ 100-200) in Chaos Legion packs. Considering the huge increase in player base and the existing SPS heavyweights, however, I am increasingly worried that my chances to get my hands on any packs at all are very small and I am pondering about my options.

Option 1 - Strong Chaos Legion (reward) cards - buy the dip?

Chaos Legion cards have seen a drastic decrease in price over the last few days, which is even true for cards like Oshannus that arguably single-handedly win you the game until Silver League and will be valuable throughout all leagues in general. From a investors point this is especially interesting, as the decrease in sale price was NOT accompanied by a decrease in rental price. As of now (9 days to go in the season), the cheapest Oshannus is still around 15 DEC/day, but dropped in price from close to $50 to $32.5 (as of writing this post). Same goes for Venari Wavesmith, another strong card, which went down from $7.5 to around $4 (rentals are still above 1 DEC/day).

screenshots from peakmonsters.com

Thus, buying these cards at a discount, while getting nice DEC returns seems like an attractive option at a first glance.

However,

With another 12M packs hitting the market, chances that price in Chaos Legion cards further plummet is quite likely and could make this choice unprofitable in the long term.

Option 2 - Invest in older cards
Expecting not to get my hands on Chalos Legion packs and expecting a further decline in Chaos Legion card prices, the second option would be to purchase some older cards. Especially in Bronze/Silver league, cards like Mylor drastically increase your winrate. These cards, however, skyrocketed in price over the last few months. I just finished watching a video from Hive account@bulldog from July, where Mylor was $1.2. The cheapest Mylor now is around $40-50. With only $100 to spare, buying a single card for half my budget seems unattractive to me. Additionally, although high impact cards might considerably increase my winrate they would significantly slow down my progression in collection power (which ultimately limits my DEC rewards) in order to become independent of card rentals, which have been cancelled on my multiple times at the end of a season.

Option 3 - Renting cards - am I stuck with it?
Considering options 1) and 2) I am asking myself daily, whether my only realistic option at the moment is to find some cheap cards at the rental market and try to grow organically through daily quests or end of season rewards. This felt possible with DEC rewards in chests, but even at BronzeI/SilverIII the non-card rewards seem extremely scarce (see five of my last daily rewards below).

Five recent daily quest rewards in bronze I. sadgeface.

To conclude my thoughts: I am not trying to get "rich" fast, but try to make the right investment choices that let me enjoy the game of Splinterlands for months and years to come. If I had the chance to get my hands on 25 CL packs, I would probably save my money. If that is not the case, I am unsure of what to do. It would be nice to hear from other - more experiences - players and what they think about the availability of CL packs for smaller fish and their thoughts in CL card price development over the next few months.

Your thoughts are appreciated,
-thegreatkaspi