Board Game Arena

Hello, I'm writing to ask two things:

1) what do you think of this new arena format? Do you think it's good for competitive play or not, and why?
2) do you have any advice on how to play?

Without tavern it looks like you have to sell very often to be able to participate in building an edifice, which honestly kinda defeats the purpose of playing optimally when you're not Hali, but maybe that's just me

1)
I honestly think that 3p edifice is the closest thing to a competitive environment that this game could ever offer. 3p is already pretty good for semi-competitive games but the edifice expansion adds a lot of decision making in every hand, because you can't just play mechanically like in a casual game if you wanna win, you need to pay attention to gold management and edifice rewards otherwise you'll usually end up with ~ 30 points.
2)
As I said, watch out for gold and edifice rewards, the difference with last season 5p edifice is that here you have sooooo much more control over the edifices building, and you can play around it a lot more. Throwing a card is often a good play and gives relatively more value than doing it in vanilla 3p, and don't be scared of Hali and rhodos... The latter I think is arguably the worst wonder in this setup for several reasons, while Hali suffers from success if you force them to play resources and not green by clogging up the discard pile.
General rule, I think that there are heavily underrated edifices and moderately overrated ones, and sometimes not participating could also be a play

I look at the player numbers for arena since arena is edifice and the signs seem to be clear: the most casual player base plays less. Btw I got no idea why this season doesn't include leaders.

I'm curious to see the numbers at the end of the season, it's far better than 5 players last season.