Developing my own solutions

[Hucklebberry]

The mail fairy is going to bring me some new puzzles, megaminx skewb pyraminx and square-1. all of them I have never solved before. Which one should I try to solve myself? And what videos should I watch to learn how to use commutators and all that fancy stuff?
Thanks

 

[shadowslice e]

I would say try to solve all of them by yourself. Mega and Pyra would be reasonably easy to do and squan isn't too bad if you've heard the basics.

Also you might want to set to poll so multiple options are allowed.

 

[AlphaSheep]

Pyraminx you should definitely figure out by yourself. It's the easiest of the WCA puzzles by far.

Megaminx takes a bit of thought to translate stuff you already know to feel with 5 sides instead of 4, but its a good test of whether you actually know how to solve a 3x3.

Skewb is tricky but not too difficult to figure out once you understand how it turns. It takes a lot more patience and experimenting with various sequences of moves to see what happens to find something useful. I've seen even non-cubers manage to solve the corners within about 5 minutes of first picking up a skewb. Centres are the tricky part.

Square-1 is fairly easy to work out barring two things. Firstly, it can be hard to work out relationships between the shapes at first. Secondly, I don't think I'd ever have had the patience to work out parity on my own.

 

[shadowslice e]

Square-1 is fairly easy to work out barring two things. Firstly, it can be hard to work out relationships between the shapes at first. Secondly, I don't think I'd ever have had the patience to work out parity on my own.

Just use the Bob Burton method for parity