Usually it'd be a Zombie, but I like the art.

Uh yeah, to me, the Skelly flavor here pretty much demands that it would get a p/t buff of some kind (like a -1/-1 counter). That's hardly elegant though.

In Woodland Protector I get that there's some flavor for the affinity ability (it's a 'protector' after all), but here I just don't see any. I think something like "affinity for creature cards in your graveyard" would be better.

Affinity for Skeletons? I know you want to use mono colour creatures in this set but this card looks its going to be 2-3 mana most of the time, making it severely undercosted. It should at least have a double black/triple casting cost to limit the cost reduction danger...

Yeah, the initial thought was "Return target creature card from your graveyard to the battlefield, except it loses all abilities." That neither works in the rules cleanly or is suitable for a Core Set. I might just change this to a Raise Dead variant.

In regards to affinity for things not on the battlefield, it doesn't work based on how the rules are currently written. The template is This spell costs less to cast for each [THING] you control., and it only counts stuff on the battlefield. Which is a shame.

I might bump this to , but since I haven't really started filling out the set skeleton yet, this'll probably be a Raise Dead or a Shamble Back. It's a damn shame that Magic chose to use Zombies instead of skeletons, because I like skeletons much more aesthetically.

> In regards to affinity for things not on the battlefield, it doesn't work based on how the rules are currently written. The template is This spell costs less to cast for each [THING] you control., and it only counts stuff on the battlefield. Which is a shame.

I'm pretty certain you could just say that the affinity's rules were to be expanded to include things other than stuff you specifically control. Like, think in terms of Petrified Wood-Kin or whatever.