| GeoAvanti |
I don't think that Phantom Steed is that great of an idea, honestly.
It might only be my impression of the spell entry, but according to the line:
"It does not fight, but animals shun it and refuse to attack it."
I get the impression that it may not be considered to be combat-trained. Of course, if it is considered combat-trained, then I'd go for it, certainly. You also don't gain access to it until Bard 7, so if you want to use a normal horse to start with until you get to that point, then heed the following advice:
Just remember that you're going to have to deal with that annoying ACP on Ride all the time now, so depending on what level you wanted to start fighting on horseback at, you might even face negative modifiers to Ride at ~1st-2nd level depending on your gear.
A Shield + Medium armor may do a fair job of screwing over your Ride check to make it very difficult to have a decent modifier for awhile.