I know on server 1, we’ve had basic mods in our contest tier winnings before. Maybe your guild mate picked some up that way?
Other than the occasional contest winning, the only way to get free mods that I’ve seen is when you reach tier 4 in each invasion. Side note regarding mods, you’ll usually want to spend the 240 gems for the first supply crate that includes an attuned mod for one of the featured heroes and gives that hero 15 power-up. This usually gives a big early boost on the Invasion.
Regarding your heroes, you pretty much need to pick 5-6 at the start of Invasion and focus on them (i.e. when picking power-ups if one of these 5-6 isn’t listed, you go with the +1 option). Unless you have an amazing reason to use an off-color hero, always use heroes that are on color for that Invasion as probably around 95% of the power-ups are for on-color heroes (i.e. the only off-color hero I ever use is Walle for 5 star Flynn disk). Largely avoid control heroes, I love my control heroes, but they’re mostly useless for Invasion bots. You always need a team healer to be one of your five. A team shielder can be useful for breakers, but is usually a liability against bots as once bots can start killing your heroes, they hit for so much damage that the shield doesn’t do much, you’re better off with another damage hero. For bots, your front hero needs to be really stocky and/or have a great self heal (in addition to the team healer) otherwise you’ll get to the point that the bot starts one hitting killing your heroes. Also, almost always take speed over brute force for Invasion.
For Blue Team, most people are stuck with a Zurg/Woody combo build as a lot of Blue’s heroes are combo/utility type heroes that just can’t deal enough unadulterated damage (Buzz is great for Invasion though). Red Team has a lot of good options and is most people’s favorite Invasion, Quorra (Ev), Dash, EG (Va), Hiro, and I’ve heard Jack-Jack are all great damage options for Red Team. Yellow Team also has some options but I’ll always run Moana as my front hero, Nick for damage (lemming count carries over), and Miguel for healing.
Finally, learn to play without auto. I mostly treat breakers how I do City Watch, in that most of my heroes should have a full energy bar at the end of the fight, or I retry. For bots, not using auto is paramount, you want to trigger your damage abilities right when the bot drops an army so that you kill the army and fill your energy back up. Bot fights are typically where I’ll use my Walle with Flynn disk, even off-color, which then means having to revive him every single bot fight. The ability to get your damage heroes energy bars to 200% is just too valuable against bots (note: the ability to accumulate more than 100% energy sticks around even after Walle dies after 10 seconds).
