My point of contention is not having to pay, it's the fact that you can pay tons of money but get nothing in return. You wouldn't give a car dealer 100k and take the chance you could drive away in an Aston Martin or maybe just a Mini would you?
The way the gem recruit system works is what I have a major problem with. If I'm paying real cash to buy cards then I want to know I have a fair chance of getting value for money. Only 1 in 11 card purchases having a chance of being even a half decent 6* card is definitely not value for money. A fair way to do it would be to have different star rated cards available for differing amounts of gems. All this talk of 'randomness' is incorrect when it comes to gem recruits because that is actually 'fixed'. How is that fair? If you want randomness then we should have a random chance for gem recruits to give us any card in the game, even 8* ones including the best cards there are, and any that aren't available to win in wars any longer. That would be true randomness, but 'fixing' it to only give out particular, low value cards is totally unfair when real money is spent on them.
Honestly, what would it hurt for Playmage to give us better rewards? It's not like we can actually do anything with them apart from have a bit more fun within the game. We can't sell them in the real world, or even give them away, so I really don't understand why playing fair with us is not an option?