Upgrading Rarity

While the new version of Thor is interesting, and I like the idea of upgrading characters from one rarity to the next in theory, I was hoping it would be implemented a little more elegantly.

The events have shown us that every character seems to have the ability to scale indefinitely to at least the **** level cap, so what about giving us the ability to convert our characters to higher rarity versions? No change in their powerset, but simply an addition of stars and with that the higher level range(s) that accompany their new rarity.

To do this, I would suggest adding new covers of even higher rarity than the character (probably a minimum of ***) that are variant art editions of existing covers. They do not have any powers attached, but instead when used to "train" a character, they give that character another star. Nothing else about the character changes other than the new level max/level cap associated with a character of that rarity and power selection is in place, so a common with 13/13 powers goes from a cap of 50 to a level 50 uncommon with a cap of 85. If the character never received covers with variant art, then a 90s throwback where "holofoil" versions of the original art can be used instead.

To me, this provides incentive to not only keep characters that players are familiar and "grew up" with for a longer time, but it further gives more justification to the ability to recruit more than one copy of the same character (there are clear reasons for having a one-star Juggernaut as well as having a higher level version, for instance). It still pushes the player to get involved in the chase for rarer covers, but allows them to use the tools they're familiar with to ease the transition more than simply forcing them to field a completely new roster to be viable.

Finally, while we can be forced to just pursue "new" versions of existing characters at a higher rarity, allowing the development of something we've already worked for instead of forcing us to start over may be useful in preventing the kind of negative feedback that led to the coining of the name "LazyThor".