Hextech Crafting Strategy - Opinions Welcome

So when you first log in you are given essence, a skin shard and a ward shard.

If you don't like the initial skin shard KEEP IT! Don't touch it... Wait until you get a skin shard that you want from another crate.

The idea here is to keep on opening up crates until you find the skin shard you want. If you don't find one that you want after having 3 shards, just re-roll them into a random skin and keep on doing that until you find what you want. Seems to be the most efficient method anyways given that you will have enough essence for the skin that you are waiting to drop.