Rakdoss Return Ive touched on this a few times, but the combination of a discard effect and pressure on your opponents life total is highly effective
This applies to damage dealt both to creatures and players
In addition to paying the mana cost, you can put it into the battle zone as if it were in your hand using its own abilities (it can be put out via Revolution Change, Invasion, etc.)
When deck-building in Commander, we are always looking for cards to cut to put in shiny new neat synergies
While Standard does change fairly regularly, weve only just seen the launch of Outlaws of Thunder Junction and were still just under three months away from Bloomburrow and the next rotation, so this is the most stable the format tends to be
There were also ten functional reprints, which is to say that in an existing set (at that time) was a card that does the same thing but with a different name