As far as being easy to learn the game for beginners, Lady Justice has a reputation as being quite straightforward. Whereas, Pandora is generally thought to be a bit more complex, so the initial learning curve could well be steeper. Summoners, like Dreamer, have an extra dimension to get your head around. I haven't heard any opinions about where Wong sits on the difficult to easy to learn for a new player continuum, but blasting the other player's crew sure sounds like a lot of fun.
As for the equivalent of rolling 1s in dice games, there are plenty of times your Fate Deck will ruin your day in Malifaux, especially when the Black Joker makes an appearance. π In those games, the opponent could never force you to roll a 1, or see ahead of time what your next result was going to be, or reduce the likelihood of your rolling a 6. But in Malifaux, it is possible for various opponents to do all sorts of nefarious things to your Control Hand and Fate Deck. In my first game against Youko Hamasaki, my Control Hand was reduced by one card for the whole game, I had to discard randomly determined cards at points (losing some good cards), and the other player got to view my Control Hand a couple of times. Meanwhile, he had the Red Joker in his own Control Hand, used it to cheat for Initiative, then immediately activated a model that picked up the card on the top of his Discard Pile. So while you avoid dice, you may be inviting being thwarted by the numbers on an even greater scale!