Can you play Splinterlands without investing any money?

I am a new Splinterlands player, and I got into this game with the intent of earning money without spending any money. I want to answer this question of if it's possible to do this. The short answer is it's almost possible. Anyone can play Splinterlands for free, but you cannot earn any money without buying the summoner's spellbook. You start out with some free cards you can play with (which aren't actual NFTs). You can play all you want, but it doesn't unlock anything that is available for you to earn money until you buy the summoner's spellbook which costs $10. So I paid the $10 because I'm planning on earning it back. One of the main ways to earn money in the game is by playing battles and earning DEC (a Splinterlands cryptocurrency) when you win. The problem is that, because of botting, they have restricted DEC earnings to people who are in the Bronze II league or higher. So how do you get to that league? There are two requirements to advance your league: increase your rank to the threshold and meet the minimum power requirement. Increasing your rank happens every time you win a battle, so that isn't too hard if you watch enough youtube tutorials and get good strategies. Your power is based on the cards that you own. Not the free ones, but real NFT cards that you earn, buy, or rent in the game. To play without investing any other money, you would just have to earn those cards through one of two ways: daily quests and season rewards. These rewards (in the form of loot chests) scale to your level, so at first you get barely any value out of them. You can get one chest a day plus the season reward which is every 15 days. How many chests you get in a season reward is based on what league you're in, so if you're still trying to get enough power to get up to the next league, the max amount of chests you can get is 5. I've been playing for about a week which included one season ending and that got my power up to 45. As an underestimate (because you only get season rewards every other week) it would take you about 22 weeks to reach the threshold of the next league where you can start earning DEC and increase the number of chests you get each week. That's a pretty long time. That's not including the fact that you sometimes get credits (an in-game currency) in the chests which you could use to buy more cards. I haven't made enough credits to buy any worthwhile cards, but that could speed up the time a little bit.

The bottom line is, aside from buying the summoner's spellbook, yes you could play splinterlands free to play, but you would just have to be very patient. Especially with Splinterlands airdropping it's governance token out right now (SPS), there isn't time to waste getting into this game because you can miss out on getting lots of free rewards. Your potential for earnings are higher if you make some initial investment to get you going. I am on the fence about whether or not I am going to put more money into this game, but I think it's a fun game that I want to support while also earning free crypto.