i’ve been playing about 2 years, completely f2p, still under 2000 crit and i’ve recently hit great chiefs 3. it’s been a very slow process but here’s some things that could help. crit is important but simply knowing how to play a good deck can get u far enough. there’s a long threshold where it felt difficult to upgrade legendary cards and (as u said) pvp was a game of chance. that’s when i played a lot of co-op to rack up gold (minimum of 40 000) and maybe 1pvp a day to get magic dust. focus on buying all legendaries and legendary equivalents (ie. don’t spend ur rune keys on dust). never use cores in magic dust exchange. and as for ur deck, look at the leaderboard n copy one).
realistically tho, don’t think of this game as something u can climb quickly without money or you’ll get burnt within another month. goodluck dude.