It's been a few days since I first talked about playing SoulKeep, right after it was launched.
At the time I only played the solo missions of League 1 and hadn't tried tournaments.
In the meantime, I caught up with some reading to not play so blindly. I also had my first few attempts at yesterday's tournament from League 1. What I liked was that tournament entries were very cheap (but the cost doubled at every new attempt) so I had no issue buying more entries.
Unfortunately, it looks like I need to improve my gameplay or my collection, or I don't rank high enough to receive any SPS rewards.
Since I wasn't competitive in the L1 tourneys (well, at least the one I played), it's probably a mistake that I unlocked League 2 on the solo missions. That automatically forces me into L2 touneys, which have higher potential rewards, but also stronger waves and fiends, and that's not great if you are a noob to tower defense games and your cards aren't great either with only 20 packs purchased in the presale.
Tournament entries are much more expensive too. From 2 DEC per first replay in League 1 to 20 DEC in League 2, that's a big jump. Third attempt in L2 is 160 DEC already. I read in discord about someone who made 11 attempts, and he calculated the last one cost him around 15 USD.
Maybe the good thing is that someone else went to L3, and the cost for the initial replay there after the free attempt is 11 tournament entries (or 22 DEC), which is only slightly higher than in L2.
Anyway, after 3 attempts I am far away from earning any SPS on the leaderboard of today's L2 tournament. I'll stop here because it doesn't seem like my performance is improving from one attempt to the next, despite upgrading a few towers and spells compared to the beginning of the day.
By checking out a few videos and the discussions on discord I realized there are players way better than me at this game, and chances are I'll never earn any rewards on the leaderboard without significant investments and/or learning more about it. It doesn't help that I don't have a hero, but there are only a few hundred of them in total and the prices of the ones in the market are prohibitive.
I like the game but I don't see any reason to FOMO in, so I'll take it slow and see what happens.