Originally Posted by JMich

It is doable for a free to play player to get the 1000 shards in time, assuming he can spend enough time playing, though many do not have said time. Use the egacha ticket from EG during shards, grab the N slayer as well, and each win will be giving you 3+ shards. You need 330 wins, and with 6 fights per hour that means you'll have to spend ~10 hours per day for the 5 day event. Not easy to do, but doable.
And if instead of the Beta R Slayer you get the alpha (+2 shards) or an SR slayer (+2 or +3 shards), you need even less time, or can go for the R rewards as well.

Colo was better though due to the other stuff you'd get, namely R gacha tickets.

FTPers can only be assured of getting the N slayers because they can't automatically get the E-Gacha slayers without collecting all the non-slayers first, otherwise known as not being FTPers. I played for 14 hours each day with just the N slayer (I set a timer on my watch and burned focus every time it built up) but didn't get anywhere near 1K shards.