I had 8 covers for Dino after the first anniversary, 11 after the day 365 rewards and 13 after the second anniversary. When it rained it poured. In Howard’s case, it’s been more of a drizzle - I’m at 4 covers, but that’s good enough for trivial nodes.
I must just be that unlucky SOB because I’ve denied green only to have him get it any way or go on some ridiculous cascade turn from hell. Le sigh.
I got it with an 0/0/1 Howard after about five attempts.
You’ve got to go for purple as soon as you can (bring boosts) as 12 AP is pretty steep and you’ve only got 3000 HP - a lucky cascade before you’ve gone invisible can be deadly, even more so if Punny manages to put down strike tiles. His green will do about 1400 damage, so you can survive one with no worries - potentially two if you can get invisible super quick to shut off his match damage.
Then you’ve just got to deny green and wear him down. I took blue/purple damage up boosts and it still took forever. And be prepared for bad luck to completely screw you at any point - whether that’s a lucky cascade for Punisher giving him tons of green, a bad board denying you purple and getting you whittled down before you can do anything, or even this delightful scenario at the very end of the match:
It was actually the first DDQ4 I was ever able to beat. Invisibility FTW. Plus since Punisher only had blue and green powers it was kinda easy to just keep him from ever getting attacks by simply matching away two of Howard’s most damaging colors.
I am hopeful that Howard covers will be available again sometime in the future even if only as anniversary gifts, Webbed Wonder was too good of a PVE to run only once.
I managed to fail the first attempt, due to Punisher aggressively denying purple. Almost every match I could make was Yellow, Black, or Red.
Second attempt gave me enough Purple to cast DDL for the first time very early.
As long as you deny Pun green and have at least one purple cover it isn’t too bad at all.
It makes no sense for the devs to have made this big event written by a Marvel’s big name and not reuse it, especially taking in account that people loved it. Besides they didn’t say that you would never get his covers again, just that they wouldn’t be obtainable outside of Duck Season… so they just run Duck Season again and voilà, more covers!
Duck Season awarded 9 total covers (I got 7) not counting any opened in tokens, so it’s entirely possible to complete Howard in a second season. So say that they run another Duck Season in 6 months or even a year and you double the amount of covers you got in this one. That’s going to be likely a better rate of improvement than any given of your other undercovered 4*s which you can only open randomly (or win one in PVP’s 1k progression approximately every 3 months.)
Yup, I had Big Pun down to 272 and he caught his 10 green in a cascade.
Totally agreed.
Webbed Wonder awards a “guaranteed” Howard cover, and Howard covers are only awarded during Duck Season. They never said anything about how frequently Duck Season occurs.
It may be the first part of a wider test, where characters are only available during themed “seasons”. If this was extended to include all characters (4* and above, maybe) they would have a much larger theoretical limit on the number of characters they introduce.
My Howard is actually 2/2/3 right now, so that’s not bad for the first trip through Duck Season.
Not only did I beat Punisher on the first try, but I did it without taking any damage. 2 Purple match-5s meant I went invisible on my first turn and I denied green. He never got of anything before I killed him. It was pretty much a dream board.
I’m just going to sit here and cry for a bit at pity for myself and joy for you 
Well after everything they gave me a purple Duckman for my 800 pvp reward, and here I am trying to beat Pun with a lvl70 0/0/1 Duckman!
Try number eleven found the cascade gods in my favor and I got the green cover to end Duck Season at 1/1/2. The great part is the 2k iso is just what I needed to champ Ares and use his seven queued covers. Phew.
I didn’t. Now I feel like a failure. 
Took me about 4-5 tries with a L70 0/0/2 Howard. Just couldn’t get enough 
or deny enough 
on the first few attempts.
Update
I’ve played Pun at least 25-35 times. I’ve lost track at this point and the lowest I’ve gotten him to was 2k. This is a definite punch in the stomach. Now, I may just be on the worse side of variance but this is ridiculous. They could’ve lowered his level a little.
9? Which one did I miss? Got 2nd in the hunt (5 covers). Got the purple from Webbed Wonder (1 cover). Got the green from his DPDQ CotT battle (1 cover). Reach 1k in fowl play for a blue cover (1 cover). That’s only 8, where is #9 hidden? I got stonewalled by RNG. 
ETA: Oh, you must mean 1st place in the prior PvP (first avenger). I totally forget that even exists since first place in PvP is a mythic accomplishment for me. 
I’m sitting at 224. I would have only earned 7 but got lucky on a token and pulled an extra one