Gaming Extreme challenges with a new account

One thing to note about Mobile Strike is if you ever want to reach the top, you probably will have to spend some money.  Upgrading your "War Room", "Embassy", "Prison", and "Death Row" require specialty items that rarely appear.  But there may be some hope.  In the early game, extreme challenges will make items like "Golden Bullet", and "Tactics Manuals" more readily available.  The problem is you can rapidly outgrow this stage, where the challenges are still manageable.  Good players preach patience, so you can take advantage of this period as much as possible.

There is a way to extend the length of this period, if you have a lot of free time.  Many extreme challenges require to increase your "power" in order to receive higher tier prizes.  However, losing power doesn't actually hurt you.  For instance, if you are attacked, and lose some troops, your total for the competition doesn't actually go down.  The same applies for buildings; if you demolish a building, you are not penalized.  How is this important?

You can game this by maxing out your "free speed up" by improving your VIP, and increasing your construction speed.  Then, during such an extreme challenge, build a building only large enough that you can still auto complete it without using any additional speedups.  Once you reach that max size, demolish it, and repeat.  While tedious, you can effectively trade gathered resources for tier 1-3 prizes, which includes gold, XP, more VIP points, and those illusive specialty items that you will need to be a power player down the road.

I verified this only as a proof of concept... I myself don't have the patience to wait.  Let me know if you've had similar experiences in gaming the extreme challenges.