Chronicle Caves, even on autoplay, don’t give as much mastery as SRC or CPC. The reason is that you have to consider the total mastery points distributed to each bird, so even if on average some of the 10-wave Cave sets give 60 points, that is only 120 points total (2×60). SRC gives on average 45-50 points per cycle, but that’s to three birds so there are more total mastery awarded. Furthermore, it takes longer to do a 10-wave Cave battle than it takes to do the 5-wave battles in SRC or CPC, so you can’t get as much mastery per hour in the Cave battles. Finally, you can’t just run any set of two birds in a cave battle on autoplay and have them be successful. Paladin is great for the cave, since he heals (Paladin and Chuck with any hat besides Rainbird works well in CC, but once Paladin is at 12, it makes no sense to keep using him).
As I said, CPC only makes sense if you are trying to level up certain sets of birds that use wave attacks with low damage per attack (but multiple attacks per turn). Sets with Samurai, Lightning, and Cannoneer or the Venomous set from the Arena, work really well in CPC. KPC makes sense if you want to actively play your birds, since you always get the points from the King Pig in the final wave, but it doesn’t really work all that well in autoplay (it can be done in semi-autoplay, where you kind of let it play itself until the final wave, and then take over from there), and KPC is a disaster with wave-attack sets of birds since it takes forever to get through the armored pig levels (and on autoplay it takes too long to even bother).
In my opinion, the real way to get mastery is through the Dojo, but you need to reduce the total number of birds. On average the Dojo gives out around 2500 mastery points every 3-hour cycle, and distributing that over a smaller total number of birds really helps (once you get down to 5-6 birds, it’s not uncommon to get 2000 points for a single bird on one cycle, which makes things go very quickly towards the end). So leveling up any of them, any way you can, as fast as possible, helps out in the Dojo. Which is why running CPC using the wave-attack birds and getting them leveled up faster helps. I also think that because of this, you need to focus on leveling up individual birds as fast as possible. It doesn’t matter which ones, really, just reduce the number so that the Dojo points are spread over a smaller number of birds as fast as possible.
I totally agree that for all-round use, SRC is the best. Once your birds are above a certain level, pretty much any combination will work on autoplay (admittedly, it can get a little grim towards the end if all you have left to work on are sets of low-attack birds like Knight, Priestess, and Pirate). And with SRC you really rack up the snoutlings. But oh my god playing SRC is boring.
