Anyone else play or played? Any advice for a newbie?
Well, though I hesitate to admit my true nerdiness, I was quite the magic buff back in the day. I can offer you a few pieces of advice if you're interested.
Building a deck: Did you say you're building a blue/red deck? I wasn't quite sure. In any case, pick a colour and stick with it. It's nice to have a deck full of all the best cards from all the colours but in a game you're rarely going to see more than 60 of them anyway and in many tournaments the deck is only allowed to be that big. So keep it small and keep it simple. The benefits of just choosing one colour are as follows:
If you're holding the most awesome green card in the world in your hand and so far the only land you've got infront of you is mountain then it's a useless card.
Coloured cards can often effect all players with a certain colour, if you also have that colour then you'll hurt yourself
There are often bonuses given to players with a one coloured deck such as the black deck having rats that can call out all the other rats in your deck, if you dont have other rats it's a useless card.
However, there is for certain colours an advantage in having two colours - one to support the other. This is most evident in black and white decks. Black decks will kill; it will kill you and everyone else around you. White decks give you life and protective shields, so if you have a powerful black spell it's nice to have a few life giving spells to support it or a shield to protect you. Green decks have oodles of creature cards and relatively few spells so it's better to support it with black, white who both have reasonably spell-oriented cards. Red Decks and Blue decks are usually all rounders and would make good first decks for a beginner.
Constructing the deck is where you win or lose and there's plenty of tournaments where each player is handed a brand new starter deck and a couple of booster packs and has to build a new 60 card deck to play with out of them. You need to keep enough land in there to ensure you have enough to cast with but if you put too much in you're going to pick up land every turn and never get any cards you can use. Try to avoid filling your deck with creature cards as spells often fly over the head of all of them anyway and also try to avoid spells or creatures that are only effective if a certain other card is in play because I guarantee you wont get it when you need it.
Strategy when actually playing the game depends on the player and I'm sure you're smart enough to work it out on your own but even a great strategy wont be available every game when you may not get the cards you need. Keep a few counter spells in your deck for those nasty spells that you want to avoid.
The best piece of advice I can give you is keep an eye out for rare cards (there are sites that will tell you what's rare) when you find one, go to a store that sells magic, the owner will be a collecter and he will want that card, it is better to go to a tournament with it though because there'll be lots of collectors there and they'll give you hundreds of common but useful cards for one really rare but probably useless card. The card I traded for over $200 worth of cards was a 2/2 creature valued at $60.