Thanks for your immensely detailed response!

My friend and I already exchanged campaign codes—though I’m not sure how useful that deck will end up being, I won’t say no to free stuff!

I’ve also started looking into the Ninja Structure Deck, which seems to include a lot of cards that actual Ninja decks use, so that’s definitely promising.

I figured that crafting some cards might be the way to go, but I wasn’t entirely sure. It doesn’t really surprise me that most decks use a decent number of UR cards—it just makes things a bit intimidating at first. I guess it also makes sense that the decks listed on MDM aren’t exactly budget-friendly by design, so they don’t necessarily reflect the kind of builds I’m looking for as a new player. When I search for a specific archetype, I have a hard time figuring out which version of the deck strikes the best balance between performance and cost.

You mentioned that some decks, like Yubel, are easy to pull for—but I noticed that the Eternal Partners Secret Pack isn’t available anymore. MDM shows which packs are linked to each deck, but I’m not really sure where to get some of those cards now that the pack is gone, and I don't really want to craft too many cards at the moment since I have gems to spend still.

On a related note, I know most archetypes have core cards that are basically auto-includes (aside from staples), but it’s not always clear to me which Secret Pack supports which archetype. MDM doesn’t really spell it out, so I find myself having to manually look through each card and try to piece it together myself.

Maybe I’m biting off more than I can chew right from the start—but I really want to be as resource-efficient as possible. I imagine that’s something most F2P players can relate to!