Mostly, SOTM is awesome. Mostly. But every once in a while, things line up in such a way as to make the game a cakewalk, a foregone conclusion, a frustrating grind, or just a pointless waste of effort. This is obviously not optimal, and so I think we should brainstorm corrective measures.
Here are two examples from my experience of games that went to an unsatisfying place fast.
1. My first battle against The Dreamer; I had taken five heroes, not knowing this would make her meaner, and within about four rounds all of my heroes had been completely destroyed, except for Fanatic (it might have been Aegis that saved her, I'm not sure; the game also included Haka, O-X, AZ and Tempest, so her HP was pretty much in the middle). But turn 1 End of Days had wiped out the initial Projections, leading to the quick flip, and once there were enough new Projections out and they'd butchered Tempest, he used his incap ability to give Fanatic back End of Days. That one card pretty much single-handedly nerfed what was otherwise an overwhelming force; under other circumstances, EoD pulling out a last-second win against overwhelming odds might be awesome, but without the need to kill an actual villain after the minions were defeated, it was just too pathetic, and I've sworn never to use Fanny against Dreamy again (unless I just get really sick of losing to her).
2. In one particular game where I was introducing a new player to the game, I was bored with the standard "newbie" villains like Baron Blade, Omnitron and arguably Plague Rat, and tried one other who I regarded as fairly easy: Spite. However, my friend who usually plays Fanatic was trying out Visionary that week, and he opened on 2x Twist the Ether, putting both on Spite, and that was pretty much game; once he flipped, Spite could never deal any damage at all due to the low H value, except for 1 point getting through whenever we used a Power thanks to Compound Xi. So he just stood there while we took him apart bit by bit. I've also seen pre-flip Spite neutered for several full turns by having one member of the party tank while immune to damage; Nightmist can do this, as can Visionary, and a Scholar with multiple Flesh to Irons could even do it while retaining the ability to play cards. Since turning off his damage also turns off his healing, non-advanced Spite is a pushover with such a tank in the party, and even his advanced version is beatable...while under other circumstances, that advanced healing means you might as well not even try damaging him until he flips (unless your damage output is truly spectacular). Either way, such a sense of pointlessness is something we should try to avoid in our games.
Example 2 has rather led me to the conclusion that Spite is really not a very well-designed villain deck, compared to most of the others, and tends to lead me to not want to play him very often. The Agent of Gloom of course helps considerably by offering an alternative, but he's still saddled with a villain deck where a lot of the card plays are blank and almost none of them are highly consequential. I find myself wondering how the general concept of "transhuman serial killer" could be better executed....the very same set that contained Spite also contained the Chairman and the Matriarch, with all of them being highly experimental designs for bringing an unorthodox battle scenario to life, and the other two worked brilliantly. Two out of three ain't bad, I suppose, but I still feel like it'd be nice to be able to "fix" Spite, and similar adjustments could be made to other lacking villains, such as Ambuscade and Kismet.
(We could kind of overlap here with the Playtesting Nostalgia thread, if anyone here has been around for so long that they remember the process of getting Spite, Chair and Matty to their current states. It's entirely possible that Spite was just as much of a beast as the other two at one point in his design, and I'm curious whether that changed, and if so why the others were allowed to remain as fearsome as they are, while he was nerfed so significantly.)