Magic: The Gathering

I've been kinda absent from miniatures gaming lately because I've been doing Magic TCG.  Believe it or not, I have never played Magic.  While other players were playing MTG, I was playing Pokemon, Yugioh and WoW TCG (competitively).  I picked up WoW TCG something like 3 years ago and from what my friends tell me, it's basically the same thing as MTG.  Since I'm pretty new to the Magic scene, I've been doing a lot of research into the current format of cards.. which is Magic 2012, 2011, Zendikar + Mirrodin blocks and Innistrad.

Here are all the research material I've been using lately:
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=judge/resources/sfrstandard
http://www.gatheringmagic.com/
http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/fundamentals/3688_Clear_The_Land_And_The_Fundamental_Turn.html
http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=15089.0
http://magicgameplan.com/blog/

Here are the card databases:
http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Default.aspx
http://www.mtgvault.com/

Here's the trial program I use to test decks:
http://mws.mtgbr.com/index-us.html

My current deck looks like this:

// Lands
    18 [ZEN] Island (3)
    4 [WWK] Halimar Depths

// Creatures
    4 [M12] Adaptive Automaton
    4 [M12] Phantasmal Bear
    4 [M12] Phantasmal Dragon
    4 [M12] Lord of the Unreal
    4 [M12] Phantasmal Image
    3 [SOM] Grand Architect

// Spells
    4 [M12] Ponder
    4 [NPH] Vapor Snag
    4 [M11] Mana Leak
    3 [ZEN] Spell Pierce

I'm a pretty aggressive TCG player and I'm also a big fan of countering and cancelling my opponent's moves. This is why "Blackice" is one of my favorite WoW TCG decks.  It's a Mage deck and the objective is to lock down your opponents with Water Elemental, stop his creature removal via counters and burn him to death with Myriam Starcaller.  Since I had no idea what "Blue" was in Magic, my friend said the closest thing to what I played back in the days of WoW TCG would be blue.  I went ahead and looked up a bunch of decks played by top players and formulated a deck based on my playstyle.  The only rule I had when building decks was to stay away from Jacemill decks or other top netdecks.  I wanted something a little more unique to my personality and playstyle.  The above is a Blue Aggro deck with a hint of counters.  No Jace or anything crazy, and it comes with a bunch of the new cards from the latest M2012 core set (comes out tomorrow).

The Bears and Dragons aren't really dangerous by themselves, but with the Lord of the Unreal down to protect them, they get buff and become hexproof.  The Adapative Automatons and Grand Architects continue to buff the creatures on the field your counters keep enemy spells or creatures at bay.  I haven't worked on a sidedeck to this yet, but I'm pretty sure it'll have some Frost Breaths, Counters, maybe Sleeps, some Swiftfoot Boots and Mental Missteps.