Looked terrible to me at first, but upon further
inspection, Counterbalance could be a very
powerful enchantment in constructed formats
where your deck has (a) lots of spells with the
same casting cost and (b) the casting cost of
your spells are the same as the spells you
expect to see in your opponent's deck. The
obvious combo in Type II, until Champions block
rotates out, is Sensei's Divining Top. With
Counterbalance in play, you can respond to your
opponent's spell by using the Divining Top to
see if one of the top three cards of your
library has the same casting cost as your
opponent's spell. Neat-o. Even this play,
however briefly it will exist in Type II, is
strictly for control freaks. It's hard to see
Counterbalance becoming a really important card
in constructed. Sick combo decks seem like the
only home for this very interesting enchantment.
In limited, Counterbalance's value is very low.
Where limited play is concerned, Coldsnap is a
very meat-and-potatos expansion, providing very
little usefulness for a card like
Counterbalance.
This card is neat, but I'm not sure I'd play
more than one (and maybe a second in the
sideboard if I knew the metagame well enough). I
just don't feel safe playing with spell counters
that come with unpredictability.
Counterbalance
- Next to Jester's Scepter, this is my favorite
Coldsnap card. In terms of raw tournament
possibility across all formats, I would put this
solidly at number one. We've seen cards before
that required no mana investment beyond the cost
that could potentially lock the game up (Zur's
Weirding) or at least screw things around
(Psychic Battle from Invasion comes to mind) but
never before at such a reasonable cost and never
with such a powerful effect. Normally blue cards
of this ilk have a way of turning against you.
Zur's Weirding could deny you your threats as
well and Psychic Battle was far from reliable.
But not Counterbalance. The worst thing that
could happen here is that your opponent gets
some advance information about what's on top of
your deck. That's a small price to pay when
countering lots of spells. In testing I've had
some games with this where, with judicious use
of Sensei's Divining Top and Telling Time, my
opponent had 90% of their spells countered,
leading to a very easy win for me. A look at
some of the top decks in Standard also shows
that certain casting costs are very important to
some decks. Being able to shut these down makes
games easy.
Kind of a hit and miss counterspell. In limited,
it can be used to slow your opponent down some.
But because you can't really rely on it, it's
only so so. You figure you probably have about a
1 in 6 chance of actually countering something
on a random basis. Now, if you add Sensei's
Divining Top, it does get much more interesting,
but probably more on a casual play level.
