Fresh Ladder startup strategies?

[Crystalion]

Would this idea work?

Rush level 1s to Hell Act 4 in Classic
Convert the mules to Expansion
NM & Hell Hellforge quest

Of course you'd need both a high level Classic character and a high level Expansion character but once you have your set-up you should be able to get runes quicker since you can use level 1s not level 40s

Yes, it does work as evidenced by Ferengi and I doing so repeatedly last year (subsequent to Ferengi's insight in November of 2003 that this should be possible).

As others have asked (and I teased Ruvanel about in a post, long ago) it is indeed the case that a Classic convert to LoD "counts" the acts, so to speak. It suffices to finish act 2 in classic Hell to maintain access to Hell in LoD post-convert.

Ferengi and I had much more powerful characters in LoD than in Classic, so we would convert them as soon as possible (i.e. do act 3 Hell in LoD, not Classic, with the runemules).

Twinked, assisted, and "well played" you can get a character to clvl 40 in a small number of hours. That character can be used as a carry-alonger for clvl 1 mules. This seems like a very viable approach for a single human (this is essentially Ruvanal's observation: "do what you do normally, but also...""). But when you have two people (or more) I do indeed believe, based on experience with Ferengi, that clvl 1 rushing via Classic is necessarily of greater potential time efficiency.

Either approach involves a significant time investment, so picking a method for which that time expenditure is "fun" for you can be a key factor to your success.