I don’t agree with that AT ALL.
they wanted to start an airborne meta (Heimdall, AoA Mags), but to this date, it hasn’t really worked. Archangel is the ONLY character at this stage that can effectively counter airbornes. my guess, is they made him a LITTLE better (and to be fair, his black which can STOP all ap generation could potentially be great) so he can counter.
I don’t view airbourne as a healthy mechanic. It’s like invis, but harder to prevent / stop because it isn’t always tied to a board tile.
Throg and some other 4s also send allies airbourne.
If a mechanic’s “counter / check” is the same mechanic, I view that as a failed game design / philosophy.
So if the enemy team go airbourne, an option your team has is to go airbourne yourself.
I don’t see how being airborne is a meta since you can’t do any damage while airborne. However, if more damage are done while airborne, then I’ll call it airborne meta.
If they really wanted to counter airbourne then they would have it that if both sides have airbourne characters they can be damaged again so the field is levelled. I mean it is sort of stupid that the only two people who can deal with somebody flying is Archangel and a lady with a shotgun when we have people with spaceships, jetpacks, flying surfboards, etc etc.
I think there’s one more who can deal with airborne character. I can’t remember who’s that but her ability goes something like if that enemy deals damage, deal damage even when he’s airborne. Monica?
Ah yes, you are correct, it is Monica. She doesn’t even need her Drone to do it, either!
Airborne (by choice) seems tied to AP and/or health gain with the exception of Gwenpool. Very few characters go inert for long multiturn stretches without that - really just Magneto even though he does splat out a few yellow right up front. Nova, Riri, and Nightcrawler only do it for a turn or two conditionally.
I agree with keeping the boost level; I disagree with limiting the number of characters boosted. If you boost just two, then people will only use those two. One of the joys of the 4* tier was trying out different combos from the list of boosted characters. I don’t like removing options. If anything, I wish the boost was 5, but overall am happy where we’re at.
Instead of a list of characters that won’t be boosted, they should just boost Okoye, Kitty, Apoc, Wanda (ie the damage boosters) in the same week and get it out of the way lol. One big meta Royal Rumble. Any of those 4 get boost weeks and they become obvious choices, but run them at the same time and things get interesting. Though I think Colossus may be the worst offender boosted. Colossus, IHulk, Carnage, and Beta can be their own boost week as well. Put all the defensively annoying people together after the damage boosters. Sounds fun!
HI. 4* player chiming in.
I think one of the main reasons boosted Killmonger saw tons of play, even with 1 cover, is because of his black ability synergy with (or more precisely, against) Chavez. The ability to deal 10K damage passively, in response to Chavez’s passive ability, can be devastating, at least in 4* land. There were many games where I felt like I needed to make sure I had 5 red before Mi Gente kicked in just to be able to keep my heroes from being killed too quickly.
Having just a handful of 5s with 2 covers, being able to play my boosted 5s is kind of nice, as I normally am forced to solely rely upon my 4* champs to even have a chance of winning. It gives me a chance to test them out before the eventual transition to 5* land. I had a lot of fun running Daredevil while boosted, trying to get as much stun damage out of him as I could.
I can’t intelligently speak to what the devs should or shouldn’t do, or try to get into their mindset, so I’ll just enjoy the ride as much I can in the meantime. 
My boosted champed Killmonger was doing ~45k off that black passive, it was pretty cool, but infuriating when it would happen defensively against me lol. I will say that having this boost on characters who were kind of marginal, or not quite straightforward to play, like Killmonger and Magneto, has kind of incentivized me to give them more seat time and figure them out. I’m not sure that I’ll continue using them unboosted, but essentially this has done the same thing to the 5* tier as has been happening in the 4* tier forever, where the boost week drives your personal meta. Overall I’m still into it, but that comes with the forever caveat that it hasn’t burned me yet due to the shape of my roster.
From what I’ve gathered from the 4* players here, the 4* meta isn’t like this anymore. The last time I used 4* it was 100% driven by the boosts – whoever was boosted that week was the best character, if you didn’t have them you were screwed, and they were everywhere.
Now it sounds like the 4* tier is basically the same way the 5* tier was pre-boost – just wall to wall meta teams in every event no matter who’s boosted. I’m not sure what happened. I’d suspect the increase in relative power level of the best 4* (Polaris, America, Karnak, Rocket) has caused people to go extremely narrow in their roster building and rendered everyone else useless, even +100 levels.
That must be a Polaris/Karnak development, but I was in the same boat as you as a 4* player. I transitioned back when Doom was in latest to mostly seeing 5* MMR, and at that time it was all Kitty/Rocket teams from then on out for quite a long time until it became BRBishop for the next year.
I wonder how much of that is the relative power of Polaris/Karnak and how much is most 4* players having thin rosters due to the iso crunch. Probably Polaris but maybe exacerbated by lack of iso to champ boosted characters
Lack of iso was a huge problem in those days too. Not only did they massively reduce the cost to level 4* over the years, they increased iso rewards significantly and introduced shield ranks which pay out millions of iso. Of course there are more 4* now, but I’m not sure if the net effect is positive or negative.
Did net iso in circulation go down during Shardmageddon? I don’t recall now. I know it used to be my strategy to buy all my 4s up to…209? whatever the old shield training 3rd track barrier was so they’d be all ready whenever they came around, and then it was only ~215k iso to go the rest of the way to champ when it was convenient to do it. Once shield training went away, then returned with no such level gating, I just leave everyone at 70 until I can/care to champ a character all at once for the full ~370k. Same with 5s - unless there is some pressing need to do so, they all stay at 255 now until I have the ~570k it takes to champ one all at once.
Saving up resources like that would drive me crazy. I do this system where I rotate between chosen 5,4 and 3s. So today for example, as soon as I got around 15k iso, my 5thanos went up five levels. Then next 15K, I promoted my Morbius and put 2.5k into my 3Gamora dupe since Morbius was my last 4*.
Next 15K I get is going all into Gamora. Then it will cycle back to Thanos, and since I will still not have a 4 to put iso into, I can put 5 levels into one of my classic 5s.
that would probably drive some of you crazy, but I like it because there’s constant incremental progress. It’s like I am growing a little garden every day. I am able to keep up with new releases, and every month or so start make a little more progress on those classic 5s.
edit: also I remember doing same thing with 4s back then for shield training. It was 209 as I remember as well.
I can see adding a few levels on a 5* as you get the iso, but it’s been my experience that 4s are like trash until they are champed, so I always just found it best to bring them from 0 to hero all at once. The only time I’d level them partially was if their DDQ crash came around before they were champed. Most 4s can do it up around level 150 unless it’s a particularly lopsided matchup. I do the same thing with 2s - i keep 3 champed for DDQ, then when they max out i just flip them and use that iso to champe whichever random next one happens to have the most saved covers in the bank. It’s too iso-intensive for me to champ 2s constantly when I’m trying to get a 5* or 4* done, and they cycle fast enough from daily play for the most part.
I’ve been putting characters to 209 when at ten covers as well. I’m pretty sure that is the influence of the old shield training. It helps me keep things organized. Lately I’m less iso poor and more iso starved so I put the characters ready to go to 71
The good news is that ISO positive is a thing one can get to eventually. The bad news is that it took me about five and a half years to get there. But it can be done. I once thought it would never happen and then it kind of sneaks up on you.
Yeah it does get easier when you catch up on the 4s. I’m not post-iso, but it takes about 12 days for me to champ a 5* from 255. Since I don’t have a backlog of them sitting at 13 covers, it doesn’t ever feel overwhelming to champ them as they complete.