Yeah that sounds like a much better plan. I was able to hold top 50 in arena for a while with Palpatine(old shard too) until the 2nd time Malak came around. I'm pretty much forced to use GG nuke to climb nowadays though. But I would only recommend working on the nuke team if you're facing fast/strong Malak squads in arena. Palpatine isn't exactly arena meta anymore, but he's still one of the hardest teams to beat. And as for CLS, I usually can take out decent relic GG teams in Grand Arena with my CLS squad. CLS teams offense is so high, you can take out GG before you have to deal with his unique.