I retract my “yes” vote. The OPs argument made perfect sense to me until I remembered protect tiles. They are mechanistically reciprocal to stike tiles, so there’s no imbalance here.
The Devs have simply chosen to create characters with powerful strike tiles over protect tiles.
Try 4* Capt. Marvel + 4* Deadpool + 4* Thing: you will see that protect tile passives are a viable counter. It’s not quick though.
I hope we will see more high powered protect tiles now that the Devs have discovered the value or “flipping” them to strike tiles later.
That’s exactly the point. Defense tiles offer so much less utility than strikes that they desperately need the different treatment. They’d still be near-useless against active powers, but at least they would be an effective counter against match damage from cascades.
As an aside: The Thing is a bad joke. I’ve just fought him in Sim yesterday evening. Totally forgot about him and attacked another teammate. He jumped in front after the first hit and took the rest of the cascade. By the time he was going to put out his defense tiles, he was dead.
Sure, it was a lucky cascade, but the Thing is the worst tank in the game.
Well, at least we can agree on this.