When you have time, read the articles, but dig in and get your hands dirty first.
Unless you've got someone teaching you, I think you need to learn the theory as you start to play. How are you going to understand the power of Brainstorm if you're still trying to figure out how to operate your deck and know all it's synergies?
I've got some free time so I'll state some things you and others will find helpful:
Duress / Thoughtseize: These cards are extremely useful and have totally different functions in different decks. Here are it's 3 primary uses:
Clear out your opponent's disruption so you can combo - Storm combo is best know for using duress in this way. You simply duress away their Force of Will/Mana Drain/Duress so you're deck can combo as planned without your opponent stepping in to stop it. This tactic is used in Long, The Tropical Storm, Next Level Doomsday, Gush Storm variants, and can be employed by GAT or Empty Gifts (basically for resolving Fastbond or Ancestral).
Building Tempo - The strategy here is you take either the best card in the opponent's hand or a card that cause them to have poor lines of play (for example, Duressing a Mox when they have 2 Merchant Scrolls in hand and no other turn 1 plays or Brainstorm when they kept a 1 lander). GAT and Fish Variants best use this tempo strategy since their game plans are often to disrupt the opponent long enough to either get in lethal damage or buy time to disrupt other facets of the opponent's gameplan.
Playing Control - The plan here is simply to disrupt your opponent's gameplan. The information you gain from Duress is great, you can map out how your opponent will be playing the rest of the game and adjust your plans accordingly. Usually you simply take either their best card or the card that you won't be able to deal with.
Merchant Scroll - Everyone talks about Scroll's flexibility making it broken, but it simply comes down to Ancestral Recall (and Gush-bond too an extent). Scroll sucks in formats without Gush or Ancestral Recall, but since they exist scroll is great. If you're running Scrolls, a small built in toolbox provides decks flexibly that every deck can use. Echoing Truth, Force of Will, Mana Drain, Gifts Ungiven, and Brainstorm are generally the other cards you get. A latent bonus on Scroll is that it can be a shuffle effect after a Brainstorm too.
Brainstorm - It's a 4-of in just about every vintage deck for a reason. Brainstorm + Fetchland is amazing at letting you turn dead cards into action fast. Brian Demars wrote an excellent article about this a while back. (
http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/article/11244.html)
GAT is good because of it's flexibility to play tempo, combo, and control depending on it's hand.
Flash is good because it eliminates interaction and wins the game for 2 mana.
Empty Gifts is good because it can play a solid control game then has an explosive combo finish.
Shops are good because Gush decks run horrendous manabases and have trouble dealing with Sphere effects.
Fish is good because it can be disruptive like shops yet run all good blue cards.
Gush-Bond is king. It draws you cards and sets up giant Yawgmoth's Wills that generate tons of mana and net you tons of cards.
