It's all about greed

Everyone wants to join a "lead" team, hoping they get the top reward -- so they jumped ship, abandoning their current team for it.
You were greedy, not telling other victims, hoping the lead spare you, so you might get the monster.
SP is greedy, keeping the race in the current format, so they get more profits.

The lead is greedy, but he played his cards right -- leveraging gems from other players, helping his circle of friends, receiving no punishment from SP, and even being "protected" by mods in this forum who will remove his name if you ever mentioned it in your post.

Congratulation to the lead! Team Race forever!

I lost ~200 trophies the first day, and there is no chance to win in offense. I then switched my defense team (look easy but deadly) and just wait.

Today I am back up at 4,094 trophies ^_^

PvP should change its name to "player fishing".

You will be remembered by who you are and what you do win or a lose might not be much difference.

Have fun

The 3X runes reward is very good indeed.

If we spend gems optimally - i.e. 1 Legendary -> click 10 times to buy 20 cells -> gain 400 points (= 20 x 20) and cost 30 gems (= 3 x 10).

Normally an X rune costs 345 -> X runes x 3 = 1035 gems.

With 1035 gems, we can get 13,800 points (= 1035 / 30 * 400). To reach 15,000 we can buy some rare cells (which is easy, as we can get 600 points every 12 hours).

So we could think about this event as buying 3 X runes, and get a lot of freebies along the way - i.e. the cells, Igursus etc.