I think the Formidable effect will be flavor text 9 games out of 10, but occasionally you'll be stymied by a Moat or a durdly token or midrange deck. I think the key for me is the flying. The bane of aggro decks is a fast landing dude with an unburnable butt like Wall of Roots. Being able to get this guy to fly definitely makes him worth a test from me.
To me, we already have Planeswalkers that do exactly this, and anthems fill a similar role, so there is no need to take up a precious guild slot with a slower, redundant effect. I would love a lot more playable spell style lands, enemy man lands, etc but I don't think this makes the grade.
Obvious inclusion is obvious. I won't be cutting Jackal Pup to the chagrin of one of my players, but watching this thread with interest in others' cuts.
I'm definitely testing this guy over Seer. He may be expensive, but the game swing is huge, especially with the flexibility of stealing walkers post wrath in control mirrors.
Don't underestimate how often getting other activated abilities is relevant, or tapping down blockers, or untapping your attackers, or tapping down their resources, or just ramping you by 1 (or fixing double-color mana for you) really is. The ability is way more awesome than it looks.
It's flexible. I wouldn't call it awesome though. Because the tap/untap is sorcery speed and linked you are only ever really using one side of it, unless you have the abusable pieces. It's not useless, but it's hard to get full value from it is what I'm trying to say.
IMO Ral is very dependent on the untap part of his +1 ability. Bolting is good, tapping down a blocker is ok, but if you can abuse the untap he goes from meh to stellar. He doesn't synergies with too much in my cube so he has only performed fairly but in cubes with a lot of Sol Ring and Basalt Monolith variants, or of course Time Vault, he's a rock star.
Probably should have asked this in the card eval forum. Constant Mists has the most raw power of any fog variant IMO and there was one where only the unblocked creatures, or only the attacking creatures dealt no damage, but I can't remember which or its name. Those are the only two I'd run. I'm curbing the aggro element of my green section now so I might start running Mists.
I'm playing 24 in my 540, so less than the average here at least. There are a few more I guess might be marginal upgrades to cards I am running now but without a strict quota I do try to limit Planeswalker numbers so midrangey value decks don't become too prevalent. Personally I'm always looking to keep aggro relatively strong in my cube, so it seems to temper my urge to just jam in all the Walkers.
This. I've never been impressed with Genesis. Sooooo slow. The one thing I think it has going for it is it's good in mid ranges bad match up.
It's flexible. I wouldn't call it awesome though. Because the tap/untap is sorcery speed and linked you are only ever really using one side of it, unless you have the abusable pieces. It's not useless, but it's hard to get full value from it is what I'm trying to say.