Primer

Neo, Reloaded is a peasant cube that focusses on aggro-midrange-control decks that compete on the tempo-value axis.

I am working with a couple of restrictions;

• cards should have been printed at common or uncommon with a modern rarity symbol, so no Demonic Tutor and Force of Will. Note that I am counting the reveal lands due to their uncommon arena 'printing'.
• cards should not be of a vintage cube power level, so no cards like Skullclamp and (as much as I love the card) Gut, True Soul Zealot.
• I want to exclude cards that accrue infinite value on their own and feel unbeatable by certain color combinations, so no Sprout Swarm or Rite of the Raging Storm.

I break singleton for a couple of effects such as mana dorks, board wipes, fixing, and Mishra's Bauble

History

Neo, Reloaded is an overhaul of an overhaul of my original peasant cube, which tried to focuses on card synergies, card modality, and creatures, with low removal density and no hard board wipes and planeswalkers.

The issues with the original cube were a) that the powerlevel delta between cards was small enough that drafting became a bit boring as you would just pick up cards in your colours that gave some form of free card advantage, b) that the cube tried to host too many themes, and c) that games turned into long, grindy midrange slogs.

I'll have to give a major shoutout to the Lucky Paper podcast and to Ryan Saxe, who talked about this very issue in depth in the episode "Cube, and the Soul of Limited" (https://open.spotify.com/episode/4Tq1JgcJAoqBveAXfJwioO), and how Ryan solved these issues in his Buildaround Cube (https://cubecobra.com/cube/overview/buildaround).

From that episode, I made some sweeping changes to my peasant cube:
I identified a few broad, overlapping themes that I wanted to accommodate (Graveyard, discard, spells, artifacts, tokens, sacrifice, blink), and cut everything that didn't fit these themes, was a bit dull, or redundant, which ended up being about half the cube. I then added a whole bunch of new cards, also adding rares to spice up possible synergies and to increase the powerlevel delta in the cube.

After this overhaul I ended up with a 450 card cube with an incredible mana base that allowed drafting a pure synergy pile in whatever combination of colors you liked. However, this cube ended up being hard to draft because a) every card was chosen for its interaction potential, so the power of a card could rarely be accurately assessed in a vacuum. b) The mana was so good that any 3-5 color combination was viable to draft. c) It was hard to just draft a viable control deck because the removal density was rather low, and d) the cube was too large for my draft groups, so the variance was large enough for certain synergies to just not come together in a draft.