In the recent KI Cup, all 18 characters were used in the tourney and in finals.
We would never intentionally create a weaker character for lore and keep them weak on purpose. What would be the point of doing that? You’d simply be wasting work to make a non-competitive character in a game that’s all about competition.
Lore-wise, sure there are some characters that are assumed to be more powerful than others, but we’d never enforce that to a degree that would make them unfun to play as, or nearly impossible to win with in certain match ups.
By EVO, I’d love to see the 18 of S1+2 plus the S3 characters released up to that point all representing.