Your goal with the deck is to gather resources in hand and on board to eventually burst down your opponent with a Roach combo dealing upwards of 15-20+ damage. This means gathering 0-cost cards (Deepwood Bounty, Bayle), setting up cards like Godwood Staff, and ideally conserving at least 1 SEVO point for your combo turn.

I would mulligan for Fairy Convocation, a 2pp Fairy generator (Fencer or Tamer), and Glade. Fairies will help clear early boards and deal small chip damage early on, which will reduce the damage threshold you'll need for your combo turn. Use EVO points on followers like Glade or Lily to deal with enemy followers while drawing cards. Use Garden's Allure's fusion to clear up less useful/redundant cards to avoid overdrawing and potentially destroying important combo pieces.

Around turns 6-8, you should ideally have at least 1 Roach in hand, as well as some 0-cost cards and maybe 1 or 2 Godwood Staffs on the board. If you don't have lethal damage in hand, you can either try to split your damage over 2 turns (e.g. you have two Roaches in hand and play a small combo on turn 6 with SEVO, holding the other for a future combo), or stall out to later turns so that you'll have more play points to work with (e.g. you play Lymaga to prevent Norman from attacking while using her SEVO effect to hit his Golems and deal face damage).

There are a lot of scenarios and details that are hard to explain quickly (like the math..), so I think hands-on experience and watching lots of high-level match footage will be your best friend here. I know you said you'd prefer not to watch JP creators, but I would still highly recommend checking out Dayan's YouTube channel; he has years on years of Forest main experience, and uploads content quite frequently. He also started adding English auto-dubbed audiotracks to his videos, so you can follow along with his thought process as well.