Since you have a love of preparing...
When you start playing, after you get settled into your new flight and pick up some pretty dragons from your new flightmates, you may want to consider starting to level up a team of 3 dragons into Coliseum fighters.
The registration window is on the 20th, and the next festival starts on the 26th. It's possible to go through the entire thing and get most of the special festival items without using the Coliseum at all, but you will 100% have an edge if you have a leveled team ready to go so you can collect tons more of the items. If you start as soon as you can, you should be able to reach level 25 (which is the highest you can go at this point) either before the festival even starts or shortly after it begins.
Culex and
Kiena's guides are the two most popular leveling guides. I'm biased towards Culex's in particular, but if you decide to use his, I personally choose to omit adding the Might Fragments, because they're expensive now and they just replaced anyway.
I'll be reposting and updating my usual Festival overview and profit guide here a lot closer to the actual festival, but here is the
one I had for last month if you just wanted to look at it.