+36 -31 cards -- A difficult set of changes with lots of slight upgrades.

For creatures, we are largely trading some creatures with undying/persist-style effects, for stronger on-board threats, more rats-style discard, and planeswalkers. The larger threats at the 4+ mana value mark had some creatures I wasn't extremely happy with and those are now more resilient or powerful options, which is good if the early plays are less resilient than before (or filled with grindy ways of removing your opponent's options to kill the finishers).

There's a whole new suite of removal available, and I'm making the hard decision to remove a lot of classic spells like Doom Blade, Terror, and Chainer's Edict, in favor of clearly better options that are more versatile and don't have anti black/artifact drawbacks.

Two of my main concerns going forward are the increasing number of cards that feature life loss as a drawback to more abilities, and lack of card draw in black to offset a lot of symmetric (or payment-based) discard effects. I'd like to get more Blood Artist effects in here, which will play well with the existing number of creature fodder (i.e. Rats) and Braids, Cabal Minion.

A small amount of care was placed in emphasizing Zombies and Humans in the low mana value ranges for purposes of keeping cards like Gravecrawler relevant. I'd like for more Zombies with my play style that aren't parasitic. Vampires are well represented, which might play well with some red cards that care about Vampires.