I mean.. how much do you consider ‘everything’?

I started playing this game about a month and a half ago. I’ve been playing daily doing 15+ wins every single day. After around 2-3 weeks, due to getting lucky with some ICRs and buying the welcome bundle, I was able to build a mono-red deck spending all my rare wildcards and still missing 2 steamkins and any experimental frenzies.

I farmed the constructed event with an average of 4-5 wins, getting tons of gold profit and ICRs, playing around 4h+ a day, profiting in total from the daily quest, the 15 wins and the constructed event around 2500gold a day (never went less than 3 wins, got a lot of 7 wins). Eventually fixed that mono red deck with the wildcards i got from profiting off the event in order to improve my winrate.

Yesterday, after farming like that every day, I decided it’s time to finally build myself a real competitive deck. Then i realized I already had a lot of the cards to build Jeskai control, just needed 10 more rares and 7 mythics (including the sideboard). And then it hit me, that i actually had no rare lands and I needed over 20 rare wildcards and I had 4 due to finishing my mono red deck. 100$ later, I managed to build the deck while skipping some cards and using some replacements I had from ICRs (2azcanta instead of 3, only 1 clarion, etc.)

Now, I don’t consider myself to be the greatest player but I do have some CCG experience (played a lot of hearthstone, shadowverse and some yu-gi-oh back in the day), and I believe I had a pretty good winrate for a new played.

I also no-lifed the hell out of the game while playing upwards of 6 or even 8 hours on my free days.

Right now, if I hadn’t cashed in 100 dollars, (105 if you count the bundle) I would still be playing only mono red.

How is this giving the game away for free? How many more months would one have to farm to have themselves even a decent manabase before even considering buildinng a deck while playing fullt f2p? How many people even do have the time and willpower to just grind the same bullshit deck that literally plays itself for hours on end for months in order to actually start playing the game?

And after spending all that time, how much time is there going to be left until new cards come out and you have to start again? And how many people would not just be completely burnt out and stop playing altogether?

I don’t think it’s unrealistic to want to pick up the game spend my 5$ then farm the game for upwards of 3 months playing mono red for 4-8hours a day to build ONE competitive deck.