Could you make the Counterstrike spell an area-of-effect spell?)...

It already is an area-of-effect spell :smile01: ... They already said that.
This reminds me of the reasoning of well-fed, wise seals with the "burden" of past tournaments. :)
The same people are still around, and soon the time will come for this, the very time when dreams come true (as Wilde said).
So, how does shuffling the schools of magic popularize the game? (One of the reasons why I don't play WT, and especially how sacrilegious it is to have Death Ripple in water). It doesn't. Without attracting new players, each such tournament is like a funeral song (although this is a slightly different topic). As for the balance... Why should the schools of magic be equal? And should it be - the balance - in specific terms? At some point, simple healing or blessing can become decisive. Why do I need explosions or Armageddon on level 117, and, in fact, the spellbook itself, for example, in balance or on a CM or on Jebus, when I have miners, Crags, Tazi, spheres of suppression, cloaks of renunciation? Why should I drag the game out to the statistical terms of the second or third week to fit into someone's balance of schools of magic? It is permissible only in the most general sense, and even then, it is unattainable - at the level of philosophical laws. [Look at the real world: the largest GDPs are in some two-million Qatar, but with real oil wealth ($100-140 thousand) and the country is hosting the World Cup in the desert, and in microscopic Luxembourg - a parasitic oasis for global financial traffic, and the largest country in the world with huge reserves of natural resources is squandering them and "playing games" with the powerful of this world. And this is against the backdrop of fundamentalism, where cutting human heads is the same as cutting sheep heads, or not so long ago, the massacre in Rwanda.]
And most importantly. Heroes is a GAME, i.e., an activity in which the process itself is important, and not the result. The game is played according to the rules. The author creates the rules. And if the author created a balance with his vision, reflecting a specific historical (mythical) field, then what kind of imbalance can we even talk about? There is a model where Earth is stronger than Fire, and Air is stronger than Water (conditionally)... If you want a model that is different from the author's, then you are simply looking for and using a different one.