Hey,
The reason you see so little defense in T1-MP is because of the nature of the category. You can't win T1-MP with defense, thus players tend to take out defense and put in cards that can win T1-MP. There's really nothing we can do about that without completely changing the category (which is basically what we did with teams).
As far as T1-2P, no one likes timeouts. The host doesn't like them because they make the tournament run longer. Players in the game don't like them because neither player ends up feeling like they won. Allowing defense to dominate would drastically increase the number of timeouts which isn't good for anyone.
I love defense too, and I think defense right now is about as strong as it has ever been. TexP introduced a lot of "dominant defensive cards": Land Dispute, Philistine Outpost, Magic Charms, Nebuchadnezzar, Darius' Decree, The Gates of Hell, Wandering Spirit, Herod's Dungeon. By comparison most of the good cards in the set were support cards, Grapes of Wrath and Meeting the Messiah are the only ones that compare at all. If people aren't playing defense now it's not because there aren't any great defensive cards to use, it's because they don't want to play defense, and there's nothing we can do to change that.
Tschow,
Tim "Sir Nobody" Maly