I've been having a discussion over in mtgjson/mtgjson#285 about the best way to get a list of static abilities for a given card. Some examples: Rotting Rats would return ['Unearth'], Anax and Cymede would return ['First Strike', 'Vigilance']
I just finished up a helper function for doing this, and posted it in the issue I mentioned above. I think that would ideally go in this library. If you're interested, I can make a PR for it.