I agree with you about Alastrina. The current text is a big problem, and I didn't even think about clone. Even without clone, this card makes Polyhymnia playable 4 turns earlier. 4! That's nuts.

I don't see aggro running these Empower (or Echo) cards. They offer flexibility to control decks at the cost of each option being slightly worse than a dedicated card that does the same thing (although I could argue that people rarely use Ancient Text for the protection benefit). If aggro is at 7/8 mana, they've most likely lost already.