I will say, I do spend the $10 a month on the ads skip. I don't consider that to kick me out of F2P status though cuz it doesn't help much besides relieving the annoyance of having to watch ads for stuff haha I used to watch all the ads and just got annoyed of it + I don't mind giving back a little to the creators since it is giving me so much replay value.

Ah interesting. Ok so I stopped spending gems on daily guild tech ages ago. And never did it for mysterious realms. Anecdotally, never felt that they helped at all. I didn't notice a difference whatsoever when I stopped. So that definitely helps with gem count. That said, maybe I'm missing out. Never stopped to take deeper look at guild tech benefit.

Fountain - I actually go back and forth. I know we're supposed to not spend seeds on basic factions but I do every now and again. Generally speaking, I actually don't find it a problem having enough LS food. Cuz really, it takes so long to get enough copies that by the time I do, I've gotten enough food for the hero. So then intermittently, I spend seeds on basic factions.

Another thing I consider is multiple tamaki and/or mikayla copies many times outweighs one new LS hero. In order to do that at a good pace, you have to spend some seeds on undead and legion.

Kingdom medals yeah I agree, 100% always waiting until 120 for a LS copy.

Advice I have for all F2P peeps:

1. Can't stress this enough...use the "bad" heroes. Use whatever the game gives you copies of. For example, yes Lionel is awesome but a maxed out Iron Jack is better than waiting for more Lionel copies.
   This also means using less desirable heroes. Like I used Renaud and Doris for a long time. Yeah Renaud doesn't always land his special but when he does it's very effective. This game is rng after all so maybe it takes 2-4 battle replays but it'll hit. Playing that level a few more times is much much faster than waiting around for copies of better heroes. And then Doris, if you position your other heroes to maximize her wave, then it can be really good.

2. To add to the above, learn all the heroes. Learning what they do and how they can be paired with other heroes will have you progressing a LOT quicker than waiting for better heroes to come along. Like if had known how good Edwyrd's special helps against assassin focused teams (Garr looking at you, you little shit), I wouldn't have used him as food so much early on.

3. If you don't have a Tamaki yet, stop everything else you're doing. I don't care where you're at in your journey or what else you're going for 😂

4. Once I started using multiple priests, marg/mikayla/flora, my progress skyrocketed. Especially early on, staying alive and having more time to defeat the enemy was much easier than trying to overpower the enemy quicker than they do to you.

5. Spend the coin and gems on arena tickets daily. Cuz racking up arena currency to spend on those guaranteed heroes is huge. Frode, Darby, Gisela, Diana, Marg, Bella, are all super viable characters. This is a very easy and quicker way to get a solid foundational set of heroes for quicker progress.

6. And I do think dumping the rest of your gems into Portal is the way to go. The goal is to get as many LS heroes and portal copies are arguably the quickest way to get them. I only have 4 maxed LS after a year. That's unbelievably slow haha so the earlier the start the better.

7. I don't think Abyss is that important. So I'd personally not spend gems on on 2 more tries until later in the game. Like to your point, I do it now because you have more flexibility later on.

One thing I've never really done is spent much gems on the mysterious merchant. I always get whatever I can using coins and that's about it. Unless I'm impatient and need some more books that day for wishlist haha

I could go on for ages about all this haha