Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-9234979-20130702224508/@comment-11067648-20130703234316

@godofcyanide  This is a great post and sums it up. As someone who has spent only a little on the game my strategy has been to try and grow strength gradually, but this is fairly slow and it does mean you are reliant on the bigger guys - the high paying payers - to provide the scraps from their table so you can grow. I can totally see how the big paying players would get frustrated with this, particularly when they are dropping 4-5 cubes on L8 bosses to kill them while a bunch of 1 cube hangers-on just watch. Kudos should go to the big payers (instead of the "why are you paying" posts regularly appearing) cause they are propping up everyone else's game experience.

The issue is that you need to either buy a R5 card from the space bridge or finish in tier 1 of the game regularly to improve your deck meaningfully. To do that you need to spend big. There is a ceiling to finishing in Tier 2 consistently or spending $1-5 on the bridge - deck power will top out eventually at a tier 2 level... and you need to decide to either be satisfied with that or start paying to push higher. I'm not at that point yet, but I can see that day will come.