Board Thread:Game Discussions/@comment-152.26.230.46-20131216174800/@comment-129.255.228.136-20131218160327

Yeah, same as all the gem business above. If you are in a really good guild that is always battling but doesn't spend any gems on energy regeneration you are probably only looking at finishing somewhere in the 250 - 500 range (NOTE: I am assuming that no one from you guild spends any gems at any point in the war for this estimate). If you want to do better than that, you have to spend gems.

Luckily the new arena format can let you get 20 gems a week really easy, but there was a diagram I saw once that showed the top guild in both ios and android spent approx. $18,000 on gems to win the thanksgiving war. So they definitely aren't going to let anyone in who isn't shelling out serious cash for the guild war effort.