What you are asking for is an unskippable tutorial that forces every new account to play the way you believe the early game should be played in a game where the vast majority of new accounts do not need a tutorial and there are many other ways to play the early game than the one you personally enjoy.
Please write a subjective strategy article detailing the way you believe is the best way to play the early game, and then please try to convince new players to read your subjective strategy article and follow it. If you are right, they will get that same experience anyways, but the people who do not need any tutorial or do not want to play the game on-rails will not be inconvenienced.
Additionally, consider developing brief text snippets to be overlaid onto the AI menu that read something along the lines of "not recommended for new players" that could appear next to the buttons for higher level targets until a given account either has reached X games played, Y wealth, or goes into settings to disable the warnings.
edit: With regard to unlockables being desirable, the primary unlockable is cards, and there's an extremely large amount of unlocking to be done. Additionally, there are quests. If you want to instill a feeling of progression other than collecting cards, add more linear quest lines with good prizes at the end. If you want to incentivize collecting cards further, create more "puzzle" quests with deck type requirements, making people need to collect varying sorts of cards to be able to enter them.