Discussion Forum

A large part of enjoying magic is building your decks, coming up with an idea that others haven't thought of yet. Then playing the deck and seeing your plans work out or not and figuring out how to improve the deck. What I'd recommend is that you sort out your cards by color and spell type. Then look through each pile and figure out which ones work with each other and feed into the other cards. That will give you an idea of what mechanics you might want to start with in that pile. Don't pick too many ideas for the same deck. Then look at what other cards would support the idea and build up from there. As a noob I'd suggest you limit yourself to at most 2 colors. You want a balanced deck. It might be easier to start with a creature deck. Don't fall into the trap of going with only big or specialty creatures. You want some smaller creatures for your early gam, some bigger creatures for the middle game and something for the late game.

The other traps are related to lands. Put too few and you will not draw enough to cast anything, too many and you will not draw anything to cast. In a 60 card deck you should have between 18-22 lands depending on how much mana your cards cost to play. if you need more, you have not achieved a balance between the mana costs of your cards. If you're playing multiple colors, you should have lands in a rough proportion to the colored mana you need. Specialty lands should be only a fraction of the lands in your deck.

Don't stick with just creatures, have at least 25% of your non lands as non creatures. This will give you options to work with.

Lastly shuffle your deck and draw cards like you're playing to see what your draws would look like. Here's where you can get an indication if your mix of cards is good. Play 6 to 10 turns to make sure that you draw enough land and good cards. Do this play testing several times and tweak the deck as needed.

One caveat though, I'm trying to get back into magic after several years. I quit after Shards of Alara and so the abilities of the cards these days might be a little different. However the suggestions above should still be pretty good.

There are several ways of building a deck and improving it. The easiest will be to re-build it here on the vault, add a proper description and some deck-tags, including a "Help"-Tag.
Another way will be to ask your friend on how you could improve it. If he did built it for you, he knows how it should work and which cards could be added. Winning each and every time will get dull so it's also in his interest to improve your deck a little bit.

If you want a more advanced help you can take a look at an article deck I have written a while ago:
http://www.mtgvault.com/muktol/decks/how-to-build-a-deck/

Hope I was able to help you a little bit.