It's a high risk high reward type of card. And some people are going to enjoy those cards more than others. The ceiling on Ogre is really really high. It's why I was considering it.
One thing to bear in mind too with the removal argument is that certain cards have higher tolerances. I think Ogre is one those. It's easy to theorize about tempo loss from the card but you have to consider the context of the decks that would run it. How many must-answer creatures do they have? And by the time Ogre comes down, how many removal spells can their opponent still have in hand? Rx agro decks you pretty much have to be answering every creature right away or you are just going to lose. So by T4, you probably already spent your wad.
By contrast, a big fat creature meant for a control deck cannot fail the terminate test because most decks playing against that control deck will often have removal for whatever the finisher is (since they've been sitting on those removal cards while the control player spent 5 turns not playing dudes). An agro deck running Ogre though might have 15 creatures? You have 15 snuff outs in your deck to deal with all of them (and 60 life to cast them all for free)? Ogre failing the terminate test is likely a lot less of a problem than the theory crafting scenarios are painting.
Because of the way you formated your response, I want to make sure we understand that I am purely commentating on the mana inefficiency of certain creatures in the context of formats that punish players for it, due to their condensed nature.
I feel like we're already deflecting to things far removed from that, which isn't what I wanted at all. There are no 15 snuff out decks, midrange decks don't slow an aggro board purely with spot removal, and time focused aggro decks trying to condense the game down the minimum number of turns are going to be
more concerned with the consequences of having their slow overrun hit by removal, not less concerned with it.
If you want to run ogre thats fine, and there are reasons that one can come up with for running it, but its a time inefficient card due to its lack of haste/etb compared to most other creatures commonly ran in formats, and its a hefty mana investment for a card that does nothing on its own immediately, and puts you down mana when it gets zapped.
Yes, sometimes you'll get board states where the opponent doesn't have an answer, you get to untap with it, and maybe you run out a siege gang commander and its OP. All of this class of creature are like that, and its how they end up in formats. That doesn't negate that the card is not well positioned given the way a lot of cubes are structured. It also doesn't mean you can't run it if you want too--we're all playing on kitchen tables after all. Your playgroup just has to be ok with the occasional blowout, or at least not conscious of it. That works a lot too, and these cards are good at flying under the radar.
Brick creatures are designed in a way where they get blown out by cheap removal and bounce, and its easy to forget that when they come down and the opponent doesn't have it,
especially if they are "if I untap" Bricks--lets just be honest about that, than do whatever we want.
