Counterspell

Strategy
Counterspell can be used as a protection / permission card in both aggressive decks. It has seem some infrequent play in aggressive decks as a way to maintain pressure and protect your units, but less so that recently. As far as control tools go, it has since seemingly a long time ago been replaced by numerous stronger cards for that archetype. These days, Counterspell sees most play in Ashgerdy disruptive-aggro decks.

Design
A very early design in the game, Counterspell is the kind of iconic card that appears in numerous other games and is one of the most well-known metamagic tropes in popular culture.

It's one of the few cards in Collective that explicitly only works on initiative, partly because at the time it wasn't necessarily seen as possible to have the effect work otherwise. Even after techniques were discovered to implement the card to work regardless of your initiative, those were rather clumsy. For example. with this implementation the card wouldn't count as being "played" for cards that care for that sort of thing. Now with fast, you could technically have this work very easily off-initiative, but players have gotten used to the idea of it being only technically playable half of the time. This way you can be assured that you aren't getting countered when you yourself have the initiative.

One questionable thing regarding the initiative clause is whether the card should even be playable off-initiative. While there are some niche scenarios where you need to empty your hand or just play an action, in most scenarios it's likely that playing the card off-initiative is just a misplay. Having it grayed out (not usable) is very possible through the card editor and it might very well be a good way to clearly indicate the how and what the card does while reminding you to keep initiative in mind.

Another technique that would now be available for the card would be for it to be able to choose which resolving card to counter. Notably choosing is used on the card Disruption Mage. This is yet another where it was seen by many as positive that the card can be played around by throwing out first some small cost unit as "counterspell buffer" before queuing your actual plays of that turn.

History
Through weeks 3-12, the card saw play in Control decks, but has since quickly fallen from favor and replaced by numerous stronger control options. After that it still saw some infrequent play in certain aggressive decks as a way to maintain the upper hand in a match-up.

On free stat update week 51, Counterspell got buffed from 3 mana to 2 mana, which has made it see more occasional play in disruptive Ashgredy decks. For combo protection, Disruption Mage is still preferred.