Splinterlands - I don't want to max my Conclave Arcana ... yet

I have seen so many articles and influencers explaining how much I would need to spend on completing a max deck for Conclave Arcana, and I understand that to compete at the top levels thats what it needs but some people (like me) are not able to drop $8,000 on a hobby day one!

I have said before, I'm looking at spending $400 on the presale so I can get the promo cards and have a good start on the set, I was planning on just going straight for Standard packs for shear number of cards but having seen a few people asking ChatGPT, I thought I may give it a spin and ask for advice on getting to a Silver level deck.

I provided all the information I thought would be relevant from the Conclave Arcana announcement post, and explained I would like a max silver level deck.

Splinterlands has a new set of cards, Conclave Arcana, coming out and i want to calculate what is the best way to get a silver level collection at the following levels:

Common: Level 5
Rare: Level 4
Epic: Level 3
Legendary: Level 2

Achieving these levels requires combining multiple copies of each card.

Conclave arcana has
24 Common cards
29 Rare cards
14 Epic cards
15 Legendary cards

but also has a variety of packs

Standard packs return at a cost of 4,000 DEC or $4 in Credits, offering a mix of 5 cards from the Conclave Arcana set. The odds by rarity and foil of each card in the pack are shown below. The odds remain the same as in previous sets. One card from each pack is guaranteed to be Rare or better.
Common: 75.2%
Rare: 20%
Epic: 4%
Legendary: 0.8%
Gold Foil: 2%

Alchemy packs cost 12,000 DEC or $12 in Credits. Their card rarity and Gold Foil distribution is the same as standard packs, except they contain one guaranteed Gold Foil.*NOTE: if a Black Foil is pulled, then it will override and replace the guaranteed Gold Foil.

Legendary packs cost 24,000 DEC or $24 in Credits. Their card rarity and Gold Foil distribution is the same as standard packs, except they contain one guaranteed Legendary card.

Legendary Potions double your chances of pulling Epic or Legendary cards with the other four cards, while Alchemy Potions double your chances of any card being Gold Foil—including your guaranteed Legendary card!

Starter packs will be available after the presale window. Each pack costs only 1,000 DEC or $1 in Credits and contains 5 cards from the Conclave Arcana set: one guaranteed Rare card and four more cards that have an 80% chance to be Common and a 20% chance to be Rare. Starter packs will only contain Regular Foil Common and Rare cards, so you can’t use potions with them.

I estimate the secondary market value on average will be, common $0.20, rare $0.50 epic $ 1.5 and legendary $15.

I have enough legendary potions to cover all cards and I Have $400.00 that I want to spend in the presale, what will be the best strategy to get as close to a silver level collection during and after the presale?

The detailed answer provided was pretty good, it started by breaking down my goals

and looking at my constraints

Obviously i do care about Gold Foils but i think it is right to skip Alchemy packs while my goal is to just get a silver level decks (although pulling one gold foil saves a lot of cards in some cases, and selling some on will make it a lot easier to complete a regular foil deck which hasnt been taken into account)

The strategy overview makes sense, I had thought about going all standard packs during the presale but, actually picking up some guaranteed legendary cards makes sense

The optimized presale plan was not quite optimal!

I hadn't specified that I needed to spend the $400 to get the promo cards so it left me with the $4 instead of getting 76 standard packs

Which gave me the expect pulls of

And finally ended with a final budget estimate

So its going to be interesting to see how close chatGPT got to calculating this, hopefully its somewhere near accurate and over the next few months i can build up to a Silver deck.