Reality is that it would be easy for them to give us a lot of things.
It’s kind of funny, when I complain about the low summoning odds or something, and other people reply “why should they give you something for free?”
Reality is that it would cost them very little to give every player the HotM ever month. Some people act like in-game items are the same as any other product that a company produced in a factory… like there’s some factory somewhere churning out Telluria and Vela cards, and there’s only a limited number they can give out… 
It’s called artificial scarcity. Digital entertainment companies use it for a reason. Because without it, they wouldn’t be able to make as much money.
ahem
If you will indulge an old-timer’s story for reference… well okay, I’m not that old, but back in my day, we listened to music on cassette tapes or AM/FM radio. Before my day there was vinyl and 8-tracks. Etc., blah blah, not important.
Anyway. At some point in my “growing up years”, somebody invented the compact disc. I know, I know, nobody uses those anymore, grandpa, we stream everything now… I’m well aware. But getting back to my story…
Back when they first released compact discs, there were a lot of musical artists whose music I was a fan of. At the time, we didn’t have iTunes and uTubes and all the other tubes and such, so if you wanted to listen to the album, you had to buy it on CD. You’d go to a music store (an actual brick and mortar store, not something you browsed on the interwebz), and you’d give the merchant actual cash money in exchange for the CD.
Most of the popular CDs at the time cost about $15, which… back then, believe it or not, was actually quite a bit of money.
Found out later that it only cost the record companies about $1 to make each of those CDs. So they were charging us, the consumers, 15x the amount that it actually cost them to produce them.
Now granted, they also had to give a cut to the artists, producers, sound directors, managers, roadies, etc., so they weren’t actually pocketing the full 1500% profits, but still… they were definitely taking us consumers for a ride, and probably severely underpaying the actual artists themselves in the process. They could have easily sold us those music CDs for half the price and still turned a healthy profit. But they didn’t. Why? Because they knew there were plenty of suckers out there who were willing to pay $15 for that brand new album.
What does that have to do with E&P and the new era of selling digital products? Well. The only difference is, that now the “CDs” cost far less than $1 to create, and they’re charging far more than $15 apiece. And I’m guessing the original artists are still only getting a small share of the profits.
I know, I know. Most of you are probably rolling your eyes and saying “TL;DR”: or “what’s your point, old man?”
Well, if you didn’t get the point I was trying to convey after reading all of that, you probably never will. 
