Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-65.246.63.68-20130621170702/@comment-11013956-20130621173239

I've been playing for the last 4 events and, while I'm not getting the top cards every event, I'm still doing pretty well for not having paid any money. In between events you can burn off energon on the missions and gain some R2 and R3 cards for upgrade fodder, but not much else. Playing during events is more about stamina--you need to put in time online to get a lot of help requests. Once you've accumulated enough good cards to get a strong deck, you can spend more time sending help requests rather than answering them.

Bottom line: spending money may get you good cards faster (sometimes), but you probably won't be buying your way to the top of the leaderboard.