I've been looking at playing on OCTGN, but frankly I'm intimidated.

I'm still kind of a new, casual player who's only collected about half the card pool so far. I want to play with what I own as practice for ftf and deckbuilding, but I can't seem to get a handle on the OCTGN meta.

What's the best way to approach this without just getting beat up by a bunch of tournament vets testing decks from across the card pool? Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing.

You can always post in the title of the match skill level you are looking for, or which cycles you want to play with.

I've been titling mine along the lines of "LF Either - Advanced, No D&D", when I was first on OCTGN I did things like "LF Either - Beginner/Intermediate, Core Only", it's harder to find games sometimes, but you'd be surprised at the number of people willing to play in restricted sets.

I keep some core set only o8d files around for teaching/training.