As such there are four types of wildcards that allow you to craft a ccard of that rarity. If you have a purple wildcard you can create an Epic card, an orange wildcard lets you craft a Champion card and so on.
Both shards and coins can can be earned through playing while wildcards can also be purchased with coins (with real money).
As we alluded to earlier, Riot is taking a different approach to card acquisition. Although you can certainly get cards faster with money than without, it’s hard to have a huge advantage because the amount of cards you can get with this method is limited and reset each week.