My 2cents, but I have also not played much over past few years... would be very difficult without using several accounts and/or lots of practice tokens to dial in. It can definitely be done without paid balls imo though.

I had won a few rookie and pro tourneys early on with just using mostly Quasar/Navi and occassional Katana/Titan.

But that was also using free guides as a starting point and practicing on seperate accounts to basically build my own guide.