Art by Mateus ManhaniniWelcome to the NeoCube. A cube with medium powerlevel, designed to have high synergy and create interesting decks. The Cube is still very new, and undergoes constant changes.
Cube Focus:
- Artifacts: The biggest focus by far. There are artifact strategies in every color, and a ton of artifact cards, and cards that produce artifact tokens.
- Graveyard: The Cube has many cards that interacts with the Graveyard.
- Tokens: The Cube is full of tokens and ways to interact with them.
Cube Rules:
- Medium/High Powerlevel, but quite a bit below a regular cube.
- Reduced Number of cards that search the library
- No Battles. No Planeswalkers that can uptick.
- No Monarch, initiative, Dungeons, Ring Tempting. Similar Mechanics
- No free spells. (force of Will, gut shot, probe, etc.)
Tips:
- Destroy Artifact effects are very powerful and should be main decked. There are also a good number of powerful enchantments in the cube.
- Aim for 2 Colors, perhaps splashing a third. Mono colored isn't supported, but is possible.
- Understand what your deck is trying to do. The 2 colored cards act as signposts for their color combination.
- Look for Synergies between cards. Tons of cards have neat interactions with other cards in the cube.
This Primer will go over some of the broad archetypes. But there are tons of small synergies between cards that won't be covered here. Along with wierd 3-5 color decks you can brew. Those must be explored through drafting.
Archetypes:
Azorius 
- Blink
- Wrath Control
- Tempered Steel Artifact Creatures
Dimir 
- Self mill Reanimation
- Graveyard Artifacts
Rakdos 
- Sacrifice Aggro
- Artifact Sacrifice
Gruul 
- Haste and Bonus for Hasty.
- Ramp & Stompy
- Modified (Tiny Theme)
Selesnya
- Tokens, Populate
- +1/+1 Counters
- Food Theme
Orzhov
- Creature Sacrifice
- Tokens
- Artifact Aggro with Graveyard
Izzet
- Spells into Tokens
- Treasure Tokens
- Spells & Graveyard
Golgari
- Graveyard
- Creature Cards in Graveyard
Boros
- Equipment
- Artifact Creature Aggro
Simic
- Ramp & Carddraw.
- Turning Tokens into 4/4s
Artifacts is perhaps the biggest focus of the cube, with all of the five colours having at least one Artifact archetype or strategy tied to it.
The Strategies take many forms: Brutal aggresive decks, card drawing engines, graveyard recurring, sacrifice engines, to finally animating all your food/clue/treasures tokens and turning them into flying 4/4s to instantly finish your opponent.
White ArtifactsThe White Artifact Deck focuses doing combat with your artifact creatures. It will boost your creatures and draw you cards to keep you going.
It also supplies you with a steady stream of Artifact Creature tokens.
White also loves when you cast historic spells, which includes artifacts. And it loves getting artifacts back from the graveyard.
Finally, White and Red have an equipment theme, which also brings additional artifacts into your deck. Some Equipment even benefit from your artifact theme.
Blue ArtifactsThe Blue Artifact Deck likes to get weird. It
Like in many other cubes, Selesnya is a midrange deck that spams the board, gains life, and ends up building up a huge army if given enough time.
In this cube the key themes for Selesnya are: Food, Artifact ETB, Tokens, +1/+1 Counters, and Life Gain. All of which overlap.
Selesnya can combine with Rakdos for some awesome artifact sacrifice, Orzhov for sacrificing all those tokens, Gruul for modified +1/+1 big creatures midrange, or Simic for Artifact Animation.
Food ThemeThe Selesnya deck has tons of cards that produce food. Since foods are artifact tokens, they work with many different synergies: Tokens, artifacts animation, artifact sacrifice, and life gain. But there are also some cards that specifically benefit from food tokens.
ArtifactsSelesnya also benefits from Artifacts entering the battlefield. You can trigger this with the food theme, or by including some of the many powerful artifacts into your deck.
+1/+1 CountersThere are tons of Cards that populate or put +1+1 Counters on your creatures. There are also a lot of really strong cards that double your +1+1 counters.
Life GainThere are also a few Life gain payoffs in the cube. The best way of using it, is to put it in a Food Deck, or a Creature Sacrifice Deck
Simic has the ramp of Green and the disruption of Blue. It ramps up and does over the top plays that other decks can't beat. But it has to survive the early game.
Token AnimationThis cube is full of cards that create tokens. Simic loves Animating those tokens, making them into 4/4s.
Simic Big StuffA Classic Cube Archetype. Play Green Ramp, buy time with counterspells and Bounce. Then just play Huge bombs and draw tons of cards.
Boros has two themes: Equipments and Artifact creatures. Boros likes to be aggressive and can either build up one or two really juiced up creatures with multiple equipments, or play a wide board of artifact creatures that are boosted by some of the powerful Boros cards.
Some Equipments are artifact creatures themselves, making the two archetypes overlap.
EquipmentThe cube is full of powerful equipments. Some of them cost white or red mana, making it more likely for them to end up in your hands.
You combine this with creatures that have powerful synergies with equipments.
Artifact Creature AggroThe Artifact deck revolves around spitting out a ton of artifact creatures, buff them up and then smash them into your opponent.
Look for the cards that spit out a lot of artifact creatures
There are also several equipments that work greatly in an artifact creature deck: