I feel like OP is just trying to piggyback and get free HTEs for a year. No support. HTE are earned from clans that are not an HTE clan.
You get quite a lot of xtals just from quests, then add to that the xtals you can get from events and it's plausable to war for free. Also, you can do indi wars without an xral if you're that desperate. Edit - and if you're really desperate you can get 10 nobs within a week by farming quests for a regen.
Nope its completely impossible, according to research the average free player grows about 115.5 CS a year while Players who pay an average of $2 a day bring in a revenue of about 10,000 trillion an hour, really shows the gap and how unfair Ata are
You should start your study from the start and reset. You already have a bunch of equipment, over 33,800 wins and 12 highland unlocked.
Playing free was always manageable. The problem was finding clans running t3 ebs when every clan is on the hte train The easiest way to play free was to find a jorathe clan and hit it for gold, once past 5mcs Find a clan doing normal haunts now, and hit item bar. You ca make 18 bil from a haunt without a chest box if you're active.