Colourless lands are always interesting from an inclusion space. They inherently support 2 colour decks better than 3 colour, and trying to put powerful enough colourless lands in to prevent multicolour piles. Blast Zone rewards control decks by giving them a board wipe, Inkmoth Nexus gives aggressive decks reach. The expectation is that it will play near identically to Mishra's Factory
Castle Ardenvale -> Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire
Castle Ardenvale has always sat in a weird spot in that the floor is so high because it is an untapped white source but the ceiling was never that high. Paying 5 mana for a 1/1 is good value when you have nothing to do, but that's about it. Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire is also an untapped white source but the removal mode is a lot more relevant. Kim has fears this card is too good, and we'll see off colour decks splashing for this effect. We'll see!
Searing Blaze -> Abrade
Turntimber Symbiosis -> Boseiju, who Endures
Both are these swaps are about including enough removal to Artifacts (and Enchantments). This helps us to depower cards such as Smuggler's Copter and Umezawa's Jitte whilst having them be worthwhile cards to play.
Atarka's Command is somewhat of a noob trap. The card is fine if you want to do 3 damage to your opponents face with upside. Kird Ape will fit that style of deck much more easily. It is still to be demonstrated how easily Kird Ape can be online.
Balance ShiftsRather than representing "New Cards" that we want to try and continue to support things we already expect decks to do. These cards represent a shift in balance to either create new archetypes or buff current ones
Braids, Cabal Minion -> Vampire Lacerator
See Smokestack for reason behind Braids cut.
Vampire Lacerator is being put in to better support black aggro. There needs to be sufficient density of creatures in the Mardu colours to support 2 decks across 6 players. Going from 4 to 5 black aggro 1 drops, is very helpful.
What is the purpose behind the green 2 drops?
Rofellos, LLanowar Emissary and Sylvan Caryatid are redundancy for green ramp decks. That's fine if you are base green. But where do you rank those cards amongst the ramp pieces. We have concluded that they often end up cut as the dorks are significantly stronger.
What if you're not playing ramp? What green cards are good for you? That is the question we are trying to answer with our new green 2's. Green 3 and 4 mana cards are already played in Gx decks, but what about decks are that not base green.
Introducing:
Tarmogoyf, Scavenging Ooze, and Merfolk Branchwalker
These early beaters join Duskwatch Recruiter in being relative large bodies with some utility (or just a big boi in Tarmogoyf). Hopefully this will split green drafters into one of two camps. Dork heavy ramp decks, and decks that are competing for those green 3's and 4's but intending to curve out rather than power out their top end. We don't expect this to impact the ramp drafter because like we said we ended up cutting the 2 mana ramp from our ramp decks anyway. So hopefully this is the removal of "dead" cards and addition of new playable green decks :)