Counterbalance?

[Pale Moon FTW]

When Counterbalance came out everyone saw it as the second comming of Christ stuffing the CounterTop engine in all kinds of decks.
Now it seems that it has lost some popularity and isn't just thrown into every new blue-based deck. Also I remember someone saying that CounterTop (in aggro-control at least) only improved the matchups you were already favored in (I think it was IBA).
I've yet to play it in a deck so I don't really have an oppinion about it but I'm really puzzled as to wether I should stuff it in decks like UGw *****.
So is CounterTop really still worth playing or was it just overhyped?

[Nihil Credo]

CounterTop is very similar to a well-set Chalice of the Void. It is a strong defensive measure that says "As long as you don't get a Grip or Explosives to take me off the board, I'll shut down a ton of your cards".

Therefore, my POV would be: does your deck have stuff, such as cards in hand or permanents, worth protecting for several turns? Thresh obviously qualifies, because it has 8 creatures that must go the distance on their own. Landstill, on the other side, probably does not qualify, since its own resources are already well-defended: manlands have a built-in protection from most removal and can be recurred with Crucible, and cards in hand can be easily refilled with Standstills and Fact or Fictions.

[Eldariel]

What kinds of options are those? "Only in Thresh"? "Only in UGr Thresh"?!

These don't really make any sense; Threshold's architecture is so far from unique that if the cards are good there, then they're good in about 2500 decks with the exact same gameplan and only slightly different means of performing it. UGr Threshold makes even less sense; is the idea that UGr needs it to combat UGw Threshold and UGw Threshold can't run it because it has the advantage when none are involved in the mirror?

If you want to turn the pool meaningful, make the options something like 'Multiple aggro/control-decks', 'Multiple combo/control-decks', 'Both', 'Neither', 'Both and has uses beyond that'. Right now, I can't see this producing any non-trivial ideas.