General tips:
-If notes + time are giving you problems, have you tried playing and then note-taking from your replays?
-The 2-man Queues are terrible EV at the moment as the price of M11 packs is so low. If you can manage the time committment Daily Events are much better (bonus: QPs!)
- Drop by the pdcmagic Classic forums at http://forums.pdcmagic.com/viewforum.php?f=6. We’re a friendly bunch (mostly) and there’s some good metagame information and general deck information.

Deck tips:
-This is quite a hard deck to pick up for your first foray into the format, though it is IMO one of the top two decks atm, the other being Affinity. It requires quite a lot of practice, which as you noticed can be quite hard to get as a lot of people in Tournament Practice dislike playing against the deck.
-The deck is combo, but plays quite differently against different opponents. Sometimes you’re going to want to go for it on turn 3-4, other times you’re going to want to attrition them with draw spells every turn, other times you’re going to want to save up for one big turn, etc.

Mark: Thanks for the info on the GW matchup. I agree that this whole experiment will have difficulty with “learning” the deck and the matchups very well. But that is part of the experience, right? I appreciate the offer of playtesting, and I may take you up on that (and I’ll check out PDC further). I kind of want to go in a little cold though, since that is what I am trying to represent…. I think. What do you guys think? Should I discuss and research the matchups more? Or go in cold and see what happens?

After you have some experience with the match-up, GW cloak is a lot closer than you make it seem, since the only relevant creature is the Ledgewalker, and if you’re comboing you have plenty of 1/1 fliers to block it, even if it has rancor (as they can’t really attack into a cloud), since you can just bounce the cloaks. This of course requires that you keep an appropriate hand, but that’s part of the learning process of playing a combo deck. The biggest flaw of the deck is that the combo, while very powerful, doesn’t actually win the game on the spot and, depending on what they have, they might still be in it if you too many storm enablers. Also, it’s very complicated to play well against the field and requires a good understanding of the metagame to know which hands are keepable, which doesn’t make it newbie friendly.

If you’re interested in getting playtest partners who won’t accused you of cheating/play awkward decks, feel free to contact myself (Brussky on MTGO) or any of the regulars on the PDC forums, I’m sure a lot of people would jump at the chance to play pauper.