This is going to have about 6-8 feet of snow on it from december to april. And the 2x12s were free.
What I like to do is set the joists far enough below the rim joist to let the deckboards butt up against it. Framing it this way leaves no exposed endgrain. It’s probably not worth ripping 1" off the 2x12’s, though.
I thought of that immediately … and I haven’t even played MTG since Ice Age.
I can’t conceive of either of those. 
whoosh?
I can’t imagine someone giving away 2" X 12"s. Why can’t you shovel off an 8’ X 10’ deck? Are you in Northern California with Darlingtonia californica ?
The 2x12s (true 2x12) were left over from a project that was torn down. Noone will be there to shovel the snow in the winter. It will sit, with snow on it, for those months.
Ball park on snow load …
Assuming that the late season snow pack is 50% water, an 8 foot pack will have 4 cubic feet of water sitting on each square foot of deck.
At 7.5 gallons per cubic foot and 8 pounds per gallon, that’s 240 pounds of snow on each square foot of deck. Total load on a 10x12, 120 sf deck would then be 28,800 pounds of snow.
Oops … so an 8x10 deck would have 19,200 pounds of snow …
If I stand on just the ball of one foot on my deck, then that’s 240 pounds of weight per square couple of inches and it doesn’t collapse, so it ought to be okay for the snow. I wonder, though, if snow is that much water…
Okay, according to this site, dry snow is is 3% water, and heavy snow is up to 20% water.
AWESOME!!
Thank, that is good to know. I am going to make some adjustments to my plan. I will post a link to pictures of the work in progress and completed deck once I get started on it (Hopefully this weekend!).
That’s true when it’s falling, but the accumulated snow pack gets compacted over the winter.
Accorging to the California snow survey the current water content of the Sierra snow pack is indeed about 50%.
That was my first thought … then I thought about 80 people crowding onto an 8 x 10 deck …
I saw this a couple days back, but read the pop-down preview. Another MTG-ite here. Its not in CS so we should not have expected that type of deck.
But here goes;
1.Try to stick to 60 cards.
2.20 Lands at least.
3.1 or 2 colors only.
What implications does this have for the “5/4x6 vs 2x8” argument?
Try to stick to 60 pieces of wood.
At least 20 pieces of wood.
Don’t make it look tacky with too many different colors of paint.
Seriously, I don’t konw much about decks, but it seems to me that a 4x6 would hold up better under load than a 2x8.