I am working on replacing Grimm with Magni and Rigard with Thoth-Amun. Been playing since July with regular purchases and the good fortune of being in an excellent alliance, Crystal Palace.
Probably the same way that some people have several 5* and a bunch of spare 4* while others do not have any after playing the same amount of time: luck of the draw and/or real money.
There is a large luck factor, too, both in getting the heroes to start and then in getting ascension mats to complete them. Money can substitute for luck to some degree.
Yeah that was how I read it. Basically once you have played enough you run out of heroes to level that make any difference to your game play, and then you can do stuff like this (baby example as I only just started doing it):
Just don’t collect till you are ready as it will continue to train new heroes until you run out of recruits.
Multiplied by 4 that starts adding up in a hurry for fast leveling… Zero for example had something like 800 fodder heroes saved up for his Natalya push.
Running Extra low cost has other benefits. You save enough backpacks to switch TC or two to color you need. At least that’s what I do and it’s pretty fast (feed 10 of a color and at 8/8 feed everything). I stopped lvl 1/2 training completely.