Riding the crystal loot elevator
I've been in crystal since I hit th10 3 months ago. I've never left and probably won't until most upgrades are done. The loot is great. The storage loot I would say is above average. But the real payoff are the dead bases. The dead bases slow significantly once you hit gold 1, so stay in crystal.
While climbing I use an all elixir army. 16 Giants, 8wb, 4 healers, rest all wiz. I request Giants or valks for my CC. 2 rage, 1 jump, 2 freeze for my cc. Only de usage is my poison spell. I look for 3500 de in storages and it comes pretty easy. I also typically get 200k+ gold and E. It's not hard to find. I do this all the way to the top of crystal or until I hit masters 3. The it's time to gob drop.
Gobs and jumps back down to C3. I'm selective with the bases I hit. I look for easy elixir or de, and use my heroes with jumps to occasionally get a de storage that's not centered in a base. The small drop down crystal usually gets me 5-7mil gold and elixir and 40k DE. I make all my elixir upgrades this way.
The added bonus and way to even out the loss of a high loot bonus is the fact that I dropped lvl 2 ITs and I rarely lose my de storage. Right now I get hit successfully every 4-6 days or so. Not losing loot easily evens out the loss of higher league bonuses.
Try it out!