Regenerating the MTG Scene

It sure is funny how quickly you can get roped back in. about a month and a half ago as I was left without the daily convenience of Television entertainment, I dusted off the old box of cards. As I went through them, I noticed I did not have anything recent really - nothing past Invasion block (well maybe a few stragglers). So off to the local card store I go... stopping in at Guard Tower picking up a precon and some boosters from Alara and the 2010 core set. Before I knew it, I've got my friends back innit, as well as stirred the pot with the gaming club I'm a member of, now playing Magic everyday during lunch at work.

This week has been especially entertaining - after attending the Zendikar pre-release sealed deck tournament - Magic has been all I've thought about in my spare time. I've sorted my cards by set, color, type, casting cost; I've even started storing some away in albums.

I've got to experience the excitement that comes along with finding a new MTG player. For example, two times this week, both on Thursday - I've discovered a new player - A complete stranger - just from talking about it or playing in public. Tuesday I was playing at lunch and a random employee walked up in awe... OMG there are people here that play this! So we invited him to join us the following day. Later that evening, I was at dinner with a girl friend and her co-workers, and I mentioned Magic. Turns out the strange woman's husband (who is from Australia) plays Magic and has complained he never has anyone to play with. Perhaps she'll introduce us.

I've also experienced tremendous frustration. I am terrible at building decks. I learned the game by playing with preconstructed decks, or decks that fellow players have made - and I'm finding the deck building skill to be entirely frustrating. However, I see the decks progressively improving and I am sticking to it - however, I've yet to win a game of Magic in the past two weeks. I struggle with deck strategy and figuring out what cards to put in, really. I guess that will improve with time, that is, retaining the cards information and ability. Also - I struggle with not knowing what to take out of a deck once it's there. My immediate goal is to drill into my head a better understanding of deck logic.

This seems to be a good site http://www.magicdeckvortex.com/


UPDATE:
Last night I played with my revised decks - still lost all three duals, but my decks are working. The problem is, with the randomness of my card collection, I have great cards, but only one or two of each card. So I'm going to need at least three of each card in which the strategy of my deck is centered around (prefer 4 of each).

With Zendikar now on the market - I'll invest in a box adding to the Zendikar's I already have from the pre-release event. That way I'll have a nice base of cards to get started, and hopefully expand my existing decks and new decks to have enough of one card to actually execute the strategy effectively.