At such an early stage i would personally focus more on building a dragon team - but your dragon team can be your clan boss team.

I would six star alexandr - he has an aoe drop defence and a hard hitting A3.

Then i would level mausoleum mage to 60 personally.

Keep your eye out for someone with drop attack and a poisoner - someone like frozen banshee (if any of those on the roster do poison or drop attack, apologies i dont know all the chanmps off by heart)

1. Warmaiden or Alexs (not both)

2. Maus Mage

3. << future pull >>

4.<< future pull >> 

5.<< future pull >> 

6. Armiger 

I agree with this completely.

I think your first team of 60s is shaping up to be: Athel, High Khatun, Mausoleum Mage, Aleksandr, and Armiger. That team will do A LOT of work for you, and likely, as you incrementally gear them better and better, should be able to farm Dragon higher and higher.

Additionally, with High Khatun as a Speed Lead, Aleks as a hard hitting AoE Dec Defense, and Athel as your Inc Attack then AoE Nuker, you are looking at a solid foundation to an Arena team.

I should mention that a rare worth keeping is Avir the Alchemage, the Dwarf Support. He can be a decent support, especially in early and mid-game. If you didn't have Mausoleum Mage, one of the better support champs in the game, I would be recommending him.

FWIW.  I strongly believe Warmaiden is the better choice, especiallly since you are already farming the books.

Save the lego books for someone else.

Others will suggest Alexs, and it is not a horrible choice.  But still wrong :)

100%, I used him for quite a while in several parts of the game, then he became a dedicated member of my fw team before finally retiring. 

I did an extensive comparison of the two in another comment no need to type it all again but here is the jist of it

unbooked aleks hits harder than a booked warmaiden and only has 1 turn longer on his dec def which is easy to work around. He will last longer in game progression than Warmaiden would without books, even longer if he eventually gets booked. 

These are the reasons you are incorrect:

Aleks: 4.6 x 15% x Attack with a small added benefit

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Warmaiden: 4 x 10% x Attack

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Aleks base stats are significantly higher, meaning huge differences in numbers when equipped:

Aleks:

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Warmaiden:

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And you can't forget Aleks has a huge single target, crazy DPS delete button that also strips buffs:

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He also starts at 50, requires siginficantly less to food up to 60, and leggo books are plentiful enough to book him out pretty early. For low spenders, or F2P, like me, I had more books than I had legendary champs to book until I was already getting the top chest for Nightmare CB.

OP, please do not waste the terribly limited energy resources building out a significantly worse champ when you have a much better one in your roster already. Sure, it might be a tiny bit slower to finish building him out, but wasted champs and resources stack up in the long run, and really slow you down in the end. That is so much food, scrolls for masteries, just for a champ most everyone replaces pretty early.

PS: Don't forget about Aleks' Aura. Getting the accuracy and speed required to get content done is so important, and Aleks just gives you 60 accuracy, while Warmaiden has no aura at all. What a great boon while trying to initially gear a full team, to ignore such a huge chunk of required stats,

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With you for sure on this one, Harbs.

Thanks for all the wisdom!  This gives me a much better idea on how to progress from this point.  I wasn't sure if Alexs was worth 6starring just going by his ratings, but sounds like he is better than I thought.

Is it worth putting any books into Mausoleum Mage, or keep saving in case a better epic comes along?

Absolutely worth books. Maus Mage is an endgame viable champ, and you want his cooldowns booked on his A2 and A3 to bring him to best effectiveness. (The bonus healing is nothing to shake a stick at either) :D

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On top of the comparative stats/abilities being important, this nugget Quinn dropped is also really important. Investing your resources early in suboptimal ways can cost your account a lot of growth and really make the early game way, way harder than it needs to be. 

I understand that Warmaiden was the tried and tested way of going about things, but instead of having to spend the energy to farm her, then probably farm more copies for books, then make at least 4 4* chickens to get her to 5* we now have Aleks. It just seems better even if we elect to not book Aleks. All we have to do is level Aleks up which seems pretty easy since we're going to have him right off the bat and will be using him.

I do know that there is the argument about further down the line in progression for Faction Wars too, which I've seen in a smattering of the Aleks vs. Warmaiden debates. If we're going to go that route, I'm just going to say it's going to be extremely easy for most midgame players to have the resources necessary to get her, take her to 50 and take her into Faction Wars (and do so quickly), if they have to go that route. 

Whereas with Aleks as an early game/beginner, we're now taking the scenic route and investing a bunch of resources we could be using on our starter, or Aleks, or any other rares/epics that might make a bigger difference long term...

tl;dr keep it s1mple.

WM > Unbooked Aleks

100% vs 75% on debuff is huge

Cooldown is very important

And if you are going to argue OP should book Aleks, ouch.... That is a complete waste of resources.  some 4star chickens is a few days of 12.3...

Have you used him? 

Nope.  Haven't fought againt one either.  Don't expect either to occur ever, lol.  

So I see there is an event coming to get Rector Drath as a guaranteed drop from Sacred shard.  I might have enough for that.  Would she be a big boost to my lineup or is she not worth it this early in the game?

I think I would 100% wait for the 2x on Sacreds that's next weekend. 

Rector is fantastic, but I would not use your shards outside of a 2x event. 10x events only increase the chance to pull those specific champions IF you pull an epic / legendary at the normal rates. It's really.not worth it unless you are a whale. 

Rector is an incredible champ. Hard to argue she wouldn't be huge for a new or midgame account. And absolutely HUGE for you to have such a strong reviver and healer so early on in your journey. She is also super late game viable, in Doom Tower, in Faction Wars, etc...

It is tough, because normally I am all about saving shards and only using them on 2x events. But to only pull four shards and get a guaranteed Rector? That's difficult to turn down, and so difficult I will be pulling for her myself. Which might be silly, as I have Duchess, who does much of what she does. But Rector brings some unique stuff to the table, with extra heals and a nice resistance aura.

She definitely fits my biggest piece of advice. Build and gear that one killer team, and let it carry you through the midgame.

I see Thorne and Harbby advise differently. Really it's up to you. There are merits to having Rector now, and merits to trying 4 shards at 12% for a legendary.

So. 3 shards at 6% legendary with a Rector at the end.

OR

4 shards at 12% legendary and who knows?