Concerns for purchasing the app

I know what you mean; whenever a game is made digital only, I think two things: 1) Why didn't this get a physical release? and 2) Why are they still charging prices like it did?

I know how you feel, right now with only one expansion (and a mini-expansion), it feels watered down. And some villians don't translate too well to the digital game either (I'm looking at you, Matriarch). Even between those two flaws, I would highly reccomend it, I feel like it's a bit more fast paced than the card game because you don't have to keep stopping and asking "alright, who's at the highest?" or other similar things

I was concerned for a while that buying the digital version would feel like a waste of money -- getting the same game I have already.

Turns out that I really enjoy being able to play solo. I can do a quicker game when I just feel like a fun win. I can try out harder scenarios and do them over and over, trying different strategies. Sometimes a single hero may not be very interesting, but they make a great addition to a larger team. The game takes care of a lot of the arithmetic (though admitedly some other things become tedious).

Playing solo makes *many* strategies fun which (at least for me) are annoying on tabletop.  For example, strategies where one or two characters just do the same thing turn after turn, but everyone else on the team still has interesting things to do.  Telekinetic Coccoon is a particular standout for me.

And with games going so much quicker (most of the time), you actually get to interesting new combos much more often.  I don't think there's a single deck in the App that I don't have highly-deepened appreciation for after being able to play it a lot.  (I still don't *like* Spite, but I understand how he works much more.)

That said, Rook City is my least favorite expansion, so I wouldn't fault you for waiting.  But once the next full expansion is out, I'd call it a no-brainer.

I was worried I'd miss the variety of the physical game too. But to be honest, it was really nice just to concentrate on the base game for a while and really get to know those characters, and I didn't get bored.

In a similar way, if you're waiting and excited for expansions as they come out, you appreciate them much more when you finally get to play them. I totally spammed Unity when she became available.

I didn't get into SotM until Shattered Timelines had become available so I never played the base game by itself.  Playing the app made me appreciate the original set a lot more.   

I haven't purchased the video game because while I'm astounded at what a great job they did in recreating the card game in the app, being a faithful and accurate recreation of the physical game doesn't actually make it a great video game IMO.  My gripes include:

You usually can't see all of your cards at the same time so being able to know your options at a glance is usually more troublesome than it should be.  Because they decided the comic book side-by-side thing was the way to go, everything about your hero is crammed into half the screen, and I while I understand the lure of representing a comic book, I don't think it served them well since they aren't making a comic book, they're making a video game.  If your theme (comic book) gets in the way of your gameplay, I think you need to think long and hard about your theme.

And unless this has changed since beta, the game doesn't tell the story of what's going on very well IMO.  By this I mean that things just happen without tying them to why they happen.  Extra cards will get drawn and it's up to you to remember that some card somewhere on the "table" is causing it, or damage effects will go off (it is nice that the game remembers them for you) based on some card or some interaction that's in play somewhere.  A game where stuff just happens, notifying the player via some text in the middle of the screen, and hopefully you remember why, doesn't do it for me.  I would have liked more "At the start of the turn, Baron Blade draws a card!" and "When XYZ card is destroyed, it attacks all heroes!".  Hardcore people who have every card memorized may find that tedious, and maybe it should be an option you can turn on/off, but I think it would make it a better game. 

They have the gameplay 100% replicated, which is a necessary step towards the app being great, but IMO it's not sufficient.  I would have liked to see more attention spent on making a great game rather than just making a great replication of a game.

If you want to see how the game plays since Beta you could watch the videos they put on YouTube from the livestream from Tuesdays.  Based on what I've seen from other board games converted to video games this is done as well if not better.  

I got the Steam version mainly in anticipation of the multiplayer coming along so I can have games with fellow forum members. Outside of that, I'm not overly fussed about it (I played a few games when I first got it) and prefer tabletop where I can feel more like I'm actually doing stuff rather than the computer doing it all for me, like keeping track of what's out and stuff. Otherwise I just forget and then some effect goes off which I wasn't expecting because the computer played it and then I forgot about it. I also find it more cumbersome to look through my cards in the computer version and don't recall there being a way to rearrange your cards into an order you like (the only time I would be okay with this is with cards that should stay in order because of the order of activation, like Omni-10's components). Also, there's no Infernal Relics yet. Bring on the magic and the multiplayer and I expect I'll play it some more ;).

I do have the Season Pass, though, so I've already pre-bought pretty much everything :).

I think this is somewhat unfair.  It's not *just* about the comic book aesthetic.  It's also about presenting as much info as possible about everything that *isn't* the active hero.  Having all your hero cards visible at once would be nice... but being able to see at least most of the Villain/Environment cards, plus some basic info about your teammates is at least equally nice, if not better.  Given the vast amount of information on the table in a Sentinels game, and the limited number of screen space they have to work with, I don't see how I could have improved upon their basic layout ideas.

Extra card effects usually show the source on the right side, so when odd stuff happens you can see why.

I'd really like there to be a log of what's happened, so if I don't understand how/why an effect occurred, I can look back through the log to try to understand it.

I'd also like a full log so I can enjoy reviewing an entire game.

I appreciate that you can undo a certain amount of the game. I'd like to be able to use the undo to go back to any portion of the game.

I'd like to be able to use the log to rewind/fast-forward/'Play' a game, to see how/why/what happened.

I expect this is difficult because the way the game is (probably) programmed is that there is a whole bunch of stuff in memory and keeping a log would require keeping every state of that memory over the course of the game, which would be quite a lot of memory. I wonder, though, if there wouldn't be a way to capture just the changes to the state of the game as the log and replay those changes, rebuilding/recreating the state as one goes, including doing so in reverse. If so, a log for a game would involve capturing an initial state and an end state and all of the individual changes in-between. I expect this would have some rather tedious steps, such as reshuffling a hero deck having to be captured as up to forty state changes on the hero deck.