Happy Birthday and welcome to the community! The AxeFX + MFC-101 combo is actually a pretty comfortable on-ramp, so don't feel daunted by the complexity of the system. You'll find it's designed to be usable almost immediately. Read the
Wiki for great tips. Three steps to sonic heaven:
Step 1 : Get the units hooked up and set up to communicate with each other, then just explore the patches, using the MFC-101 to advance through all the presets. This will give you a sense of how the MFC-101 reflects the state of the effects and so on. Stomp on buttons to turn effects on / off. Just spend some time hearing the great tones and seeing what information is available at you feet while you're playing.
Step 2 : Fire up Axe-Edit and walk through the patches again, watching how the effect / amp / cabinet chains in each preset are built in the interface. Take notes, writing down which presets seem immediately usable and close to sounds you want. Use Axe-Edit to switch stuff around; try different effects / amps / cabinets on some of the presets to see how that affects the sound. Unless you SAVE those changes, you aren't changing anything in presets, so mess around with them and experiment. If you make an adjustment and think "oh man that's awesome", save it to a blank memory location in bank D for future reference.
Step 3 : Copy some of those favorite presets to new memory locations in the bank D. Start to tweak the parameters to get them closer to your dream tone. Replace (or remove) effects you won't ever use. Try your new sounds at different volume levels, with different guitars.
Step 4 (optional / advanced) : If you really want to KNOW the AxeFX at a deep level, begin to build your own tones from empty presets by selecting every block / amp / cabinet from scratch. This is a great way to master the environment. It's also not entirely necessary, as you can always begin with a really inspiring preset tone. You can find a lot of fantastic tones on the AxeChange, and that's also a great way to dig into the architecture.
Once you have a handful of good foundation tones, start to practice in the setting you'll be using the system in. For me, this is both the studio and on stage with bands. I took the AxeFX rig to rehearsals five days after it arrived, and kept Axe-Edit running on my laptop during rehearsal so I could make quick adjustments. By the time I'd had my system for ten days I was on tour with it, leaving my boutique pedals and tube amp at home.
I grin every time someone asks about my stage rig. Yes, that is a Fractal Audio AxeFX system. Yes, everything you've heard about it is true : it wasn't cheap, it sounds amazing, it is incredibly flexible and powerful... No, I don't have any other signal processing happening anywhere in my rig... everything you are hearing is coming from that 2-space box. Yes, it is, in fact, reverse-engineered alien technology and that's why the logo looks like a crop circle*.
* I actually made that statement in an interview recently. Oh man I hope they print that.
