What are the benefits of waiting to drop troops second?

I've had a match where I waited the entire time for the other person to go. The game ended in a draw with anyone dropping a troop. The reason I waited so long, was because I had a bad initial draw for an aggressive move. So whether you should wait or not depends on the cards you get and the deck you are running. If you are running a low cost deck, a tower deck, or a spawner deck, a lot of the time you will want to play earlier. However, higher cost decks tend to want to go second, because they want to see where it is safe to deploy troops, and what they need to use to counter, to maximize elixir efficiency.

I think it really depends on the person, I once played someone who was trying to rush and kill my base really fast but it didn't work. But I'm getting sidetracked… I think that TOO long would be at 1 min when the double elixir starts. Most likely the opponents want you to deploy first so they can attack on the other side. Hope I helped!

Sometimes it pays to attack first and use a decoy. For example lets say you use some goblins (cost 2) and your opponent plays a high cost card as a counter. You know you have more elixir than your opponent and can launch an attack on the other side, knowing that it has a good chance of success.