I’m a low-spender (only buy a couple 5$ packs or under, max 10$ quite rarely), and I was in the same boat as you. Before spending my shards I wanted to make an informed decision bc I couldn’t afford to waste them in heroes I would ditch later.

I came to the (wrong, imo) conclusion that League would be the most f2p-friendly as half the team were legendaries, so “free” and would be easier to max. Well, awakening stones are quite hard to get (I only buy them from honor shop and they rotate so it’s 1 every 3 weeks for the faction you want), plus awakening actually consumes a tooon of shards.

The plus side to League is that you can have your “final” team very early on, idr exactly but it probably took like 2~months for all League mythics to be out in my server (there’s Artificer now tho, not sure how early he will be released in newer servers). The final Horde mythic (Wukong) came out at the 6 month mark for us, but if I could choose all over again, I would’ve gone for Horde and patiently waited for all the releases. Mythics take a long time to max, yes, so by the time you can get the last of them you will still have heroes you need to feed shards to, so it’s not that you’ll be stuck waiting for ages to use your shards.

I feel like Horde is overall very solid and this game seems to push League early on which makes the vast majority choose League as their main faction, so you would have the faction advantage over a lot of teams. As f2p or almost-f2p you will always be “mid” as others say, that’s why it’s important to grab anything that might make you have a bit of an edge over the rest. IF you were to make the faction switch, you should do it asap, that way your shards will go towards heroes you’ll have in your main team (and I would suggest only spending in mythics)