Getting that first level of a colour power for a 4*

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As a somewhat-casual, somewhat-serious player of MPQ who is starting to get 4* characters, I've found getting that first cover for a power to be really frustrating.
In my case, I've been trying since Iceman's release now to get that first blue power for the character. However, for players who are looking for one specific power, the current distribution model for 4* characters is very frustrating, because there is almost no way to target something so specific in gameplay.

Now, the only ways to aim for a specific 4* cover (after the initial release event for a character, when covers are slightly more accessible) seem to be waiting for them to show up as a ranking reward or waiting for the cover to appear in the Deadpool Daily vault, but both of those things are very highly subject to luck and timing. For both PvP and PvE events, 4* characters who are not newly being released tend to only be awarded for coming in 1st (or, sometimes, 1st and 2nd), which is subject as much to luck as it is effort, because landing in a pool of players with two others who are really dedicated and aggressive can result a situation such as what happened to me in a recent PvP, where the top five players all have shields on, and I can't catch the top slot because actively competing = vulnerability, and I'd come out of every match to find that I'd been attacked and had lost as many points as I'd gained. 4*s are also available for earning 1000 points in a single PvP match, but I have never once seen anyone hit that score on the leaderboard.

For Deadpool Daily vaults, saving up tokens is very time consuming, and even then the percent chance of netting a cover is small. After saving tokens for nearly two months, I finally had blue-power Iceman show up in my vault, and spent all 52 tokens I had (including the 10 I netted while that vault was open) to no avail, not totally surprising considering that 52/300 = 17.3% — a decent chance of getting the power I wanted, but by no means a guarantee. I could buy Hero Points and keep going at the vault, but paying $49.99 to get the 7000 Hero Points for an additional 40 draws is still by no means a guarantee: spending $50 for a 16.1% chance of Iceman's blue power is by no means a sound course of action.

At least before the legendary tokens were implemented specific 4* covers were offered it was sometimes possible to get a specific 4* character as a very ambitious progression reward during PvE events; now that those have been replaced with legendary tokens it actually makes building up a particular 4* character much more difficult: I only have about a 1.5% chance of pulling a blue-power Iceman from a Legendary Token, and that will decrease even further once Amadeus Cho and Ghost Rider are added to the draw pool.

1* and 2* Characters drop regularly. With 3* Characters, once you have one, you can wait long enough and the color power you need will eventually show up in Deadpool's Daily rotation. 5* Characters are the new holy grail, suitably difficult to acquire and power up. That leaves 4* characters in this nebulous state that's very difficult to cultivate until you've powered someone up fully and can challenge Deadpool every five days, and even after that it's slow going.

Here are a few ways I can think of that might make getting that first level of a power less frustrating:

1) Make it possible to purchase the first level of a power with hero points, just like subsequent levels can be purchased. While I know this diminishes somewhat the 'specialness' of getting that first cover, it makes it less of a crazy numbers game. If you want to keep the barrier to entry, you could double the hero point cost for that first level. Yes, spending 5000 hero points for that first blue power level is outlandish, but at least it makes it a possibility and something to save up for (or purchase).

2) Increase the commonality of specific 4* characters (rather than legendary tokens) as rewards. This is being talked about on a number of other threads on this forum, so I won't bother with it here.

3) There's a dragon-collecting vertical shooting game app that I played for a while that had an interesting answer to the problems of random draws: every once in a while, under very rare circumstances (one-time IAPs, rewards for playing consecutive days, and special seasonal events), players would be allowed to SELECT a particular hero to receive rather than having to DRAW one from the pool. While of course this leaves plenty of considerations about game-design and play balance, perhaps a chance to select a particular cover/power combination that a player needs would be a good answer to players like me who've spent months thinking "If only I could get that ONE cover I really need."
The holidays are coming up; it might be a nice gift to the MPQ community....