After reading everyone’s responses, it looks like one more piece of info might be helpful. I think MPQ does a great job of bringing the marvel comic characters into the game. I like the way each hero can face a board in a somewhat unique way using powers they have in the comic books. However, I would rather play 5 or 6 strategic matches at my slow pace than to blast through node after node hoping for favorable cascades. Since there can be strategy involved in setting up possible cascades, this point might be better understood by saying I prefer a chess game over playing a slot machine.
If you add that info to what I wrote in the OP hopefully you can see how the sandbox is appealing (at least PVP… PVE sounds worse w/o alliance).
Thank you to everyone who responded to my questions in the OP. It sounds like sandbox PVP best fits my play-style, but I am going to go contemplate all the food for thought now… with one last comment that I would not want the unlimited ISO/HP, I do not mind earning the covers or giving money occasionally to a game I enjoy.
everyone is talking about progression, i rather have a wide and ready roster.
i dont want/need to max my top tier team and play exclusively with that 3 characters.
i want to incorporate more strategy. i want to try and perfect counter teams, try powerful team combinations.
“the journey is the reward” is nice and all, but imo a year long journey for a mobile game (not to finish, only to have playable characters) is more than enough.
now i want to play, throw that crawling progression out the window and let me concentrate on how to build my team so i can beat that hulkbuster/fistbuster/oldsurferphoenixman team.
its not solely about progression.
its about playing the way you like best.
edit:
i like to hoard tokens to open them when im bored.
opened a legendary, 5 heroic, 4(5? dunno) from the current venom pve and a tinykitty load of standard ones.
you know where this is going → got another reed and iso.
yeah, progression. dont kid yourself.
I too enjoy playing this way and spent the first month or two of my time attempting to match damage OP Juggs until he died and using no powers, thus giving me a good denial game which is my preferred strategy. This means I can take on teams way above my level and win (about 30% of the time) because I’m not as focussed on simply firing powers and hoping for cascades. I control the game a bit more.
Note: My biggest scalp was a JG (lvl184)/IMHB (lvl 167)/OML (270) with my LCap 127/KP 127/OBW 94
Occurrences of this are a LOT less likely. My alliance has a lot of underleveled rosters. They take their rosters to 120 or 140 across the board, and just stockpile until its feasible to move into the next tier without ruining their gameplay via scaling. Some of those members have had well over 2 Million iso-8 in their cache, still steadily growing. I have a feeling that accruing resources by normal game play will pretty much never be enough to get you sandboxed anymore. Certainly not in a timeframe that’d be reasonable for someone looking to get there on purpose.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve thought about it a lot. I wouldn’t sandbox my main account though, and I barely have time to play the game enough to make progress, so if I did I’d likely only play that sandbox’d account, which in turn means leaving my alliance community behind… and I think if I ever get to that particular point, I’ve probably already moved onto another game entirely anyway. It took quite a bit to quit world of warcrack, but once I was finally ok with leaving that community behind, all of a sudden it was pretty easy, and I never really looked back.