I started playing a few months ago and went to my first draft game last week (won 2/4 games).
Nice job. That's pretty good for a first draft.
I feel like I'm playing it incorrectly.
Would you mind posting your decklist?
So you don't set your deck, you have to shuffle, right?
Like isn't it 3 minutes for Tournaments?
Yes you have to shuffle. There is no set time for how long you have to shuffle, but after you finish shuffling, you have to let your opponent handle your deck. That can simply mean they tap the top of it and give it back, they can cut a few times, or they can even shuffle the deck. However, you don't want to be shuffling too long because each round in the tournament is 45 minutes for best 2 out of 3, meaning you want as much time to play as possible if it goes into game 3.
And decks aren't called life, death or whatever. They're Green (it has forests, basically), Red (mountains), Black (swamps), White (Plains), and Blue (Islands). And contrary to common belief, White isn't good, Black isn't evil. In fact, I'd say White's the most likely to be evil color, but that's really an opinion.
Green stands for Growth and Power. Red is Anger, Passion, and Fury. Blue is all about Knowledge, Trickery, and Cunning. White stands for Judgement and Purity. Black is Deceit, Sacrifice and Destruction. You'll notice that most cards meet these ideas. Predator Ooze and Primordial Hydra both grow and become powerful. In addition to that, green is all about getting land and mana. Blue is famous for it's draw spells and counters. Red is famous for Haste and it's cheap instant damage and creatures. White has most of the board wipes to level the playing field and life-gaining spells. Black has some of the most powerful spells, but it usually requires you pay some amount of life or sacrifice some amount of guys. Black is also famous for it's removal spells.
As far as what decks are called, decks are usually addressed by their cornerstone card, combo, or theme more often than their color. CawBlade is a blue and white deck that focuses heavily on equipping a Sword of Feast and Famine (or one of the others) and smashing the opponent with it. One of the best creatures to do this with is Squadron Hawk because once you stick one, you automatically get 3 back up hawks in case the original dies. Caw for the Hawks, Blade for the Sword. CawBlade. Another example of this is Exarch Twin. Though the deck is Red and Blue, the name comes from it's two-card combo. Vampires and Goblins consist of handful of Vampires and Goblins respectively. And while there are some decks that get their name from their colors (ie U/W Control), they are typically called by their Ravnica Guildname if it is two-colored (ie Boros, Izzet, Gruul, etc.) or by the shard (ally) name (ie Bant, Grixis, Jund, Naya or Esper). I'm pretty sure the other (enemy) five 3-color decks have names too, but nothing comes to mind right now.
Anyway, I just remembered how awesome
magic.tcgplayer.com's articles are. Very helpful and pretty funny sometimes too. They are generally aimed towards Standard, but other formats pop up quite often also.
