You're welcome bro! I think you are making some good buys and decisions there,
If I were you I'll try to get myself a level 2 Obsidian or Darius or Kelya whenever it's cheap. That would cost 15-20$(I know it's pricey but that's the best thing to do) Than for every dollar add some other lvl 2 card (for obsidian Goblin Psychic, Regal Peryton etc.) You'll see that all bots out there using nearly the same teams. Beat them by having a lvl 2 of the same team, with an advantage. This will be your out of bronze guarantee!
Keep your collected money on pools, I'm using Swap.Hive:PLN pool right now, I know it won't give you much but set a goal, grow your money for let's say 15 days on a LP and you got some small stuff on your wallet. One day it will get more and more. I'm collecting money for a land for 8 days now and I got so good come-back from pools.
For the cp don't use the automatic, try peakmonsters rent page, refresh the page and act fast on good rent deals! Right now my average rent per CP is 500 CP/DEC. That means for every 1 dec I get 500 CP. So I rent 15K CP for 30 dec a day. Now because I'm gold I rent nearly 90k for 180 DEC/day.
Rent some monsters for only 1 day, give 1 dec for the rent and try out better cards that you can't buy. Believe me when you are doing that CP collection renting I told you above, sometimes you come up with very good deals. Yesterday I saw a Dark Haon for 1.5 DEC/Day but I wasn't fast enough to rent it!
If you are working you may want to use a bot for when you are not playing, go search PcJones bot on the internet, it's very basic to use.
If you by chance get a card pack open it with potions and if you get something that makes money go back to buying card packs again. Believe me the card prices will fall more at least for a month or two than you can consider keeping good cards coming for card packs. Buy the card packs outside of Splinterlands, on tribaldex. It's cheaper, airdrop won't be your concern for a long time, it's still not for me yet.
Find a guild and play brawls, after a month you will maybe get to have gladius cards and it feels nice!
I don't know, these are my principles, someone may do things different. Maybe you know some of them and doing it already. I just wanted other starters to know these things too.
I think you can tweak things on your own way too other than how I'm doing it. And hey, keep on creating good posts too :)