Collective Brutality is in for a couple reasons. At one point I had 3 in just because of how good it was in game 1. Aside from being an all-around decent card, it is the only thing in the deck that gains us life -- no small feat considering sometimes 2 more turns is all you need for Bitterblossom to win for you. Escalate is used semi-frequently to pitch extra lands, which you do tend to draw a decent number of from ninjas + ice fangs. I'm halfway considering a
Chemister's Insight for a similar land pitching ability, but 4 mana is pricy for something that could be better (at 4 mana you could get Cryptic Command in here, which I've tried but cut).
CoBru is actually a great card against Burn and other really quick decks, killing their early creatures while gaining life and hitting a burn spell, but its added bonus is in pumping goyf +3/+3 or more when you pitch a Bitterblossom that you don't want to cast against them usually anyway. Against Humans it's much worse than other removal but still hits Meddling Mage or Freebooter in the first couple turns allowing you to slow down their exponential growth enough to get your other preventative measures in place. Being a "hand hate" that can also kill creatures is the biggest plus.
The interesting change to Modern with the addition of Force of Negation is I don't think hand hate is absolutely required anymore. Thoughtseize hurts with Bitterblossoms and in general against aggro since it makes you play a turn 1 untapped land, which usually means you take damage from a dual at some point later on (or take 5 on turn 1). Most of the reason to play Thoughtseize over Inquisition is the go-big style decks but they get punished quite hard by Force. I ended up cutting all non-Cobru hand hate just because they're such bad cards mid-late game, generally.
Burn isn't as much of a problem since we can slow them a lot with removal + spellstutters + Force while allowing Goyf to end the game fast. Humans are very problematic and
Blast Zone could potentially go higher than 1 if I really can't get that matchup in check.
Right now the "finish the game fast" slots are all Goyfs, but I agree that a Sword of ______&_____ could be very good in here. 5 mana for its first use is always the main issue, and Goyf just being a big blocker helps a lot of the time.
I'll have to think about
Cabal Therapist, I haven't considered it at all yet. It'd need some extra hand-looking effects for it to be really effective but menace is actually incredibly good so that alone makes it potentially worth it. Also, having the potential to just absolutely screw people over is always nice. At this point I don't know what I'd cut. It's kind of nice with Bitterblossom but the first turn you'd get that to work is turn 3 and I think you pretty much always sac this guy on turn 2 to disrupt your opponent.
The main question I guess is which matchups that I'm having problems with right now does it help in (does it help against Humans?)? I'd have to think about the answer to that more and/or just test more.
Thanks for the input!