While very efficient I stay away from dryer lint as my source for it has a tad too much dog and cat fur in it and thus has an unpleasant aroma...

Cotton balls and PJ and Quick Tinder don't stink.

It's interesting that nobody has mentioned a magnesium bar. I have yet to get good enough with Mg such that I would feel comfortable relying on it. Mg burns so quickly that I need something else there that will catch fire and last longer. Mg is more like a catalyst to help get other tinder going.

Good point ireckon. I keep a mag bar in all my kits as a back-up. Very dependable. I tend to think of the magnesium as a tinder helper rather than tinder. Of course, it's got the addd benefit of an attached the ferro rod - another way to make sparks.

I have at least two mag bars, sitting quietly in my gear closet. I never used them consistently either. There are alternatives (dryer lint, cotton balls) that are just as good, even more consistent, and slightly lighter, for that matter.

I also like to carry a bit of alcohol based hand sanitizer. Besides keeping me hygienic, it also is a great fire starter - even works as straight fuel in an alcohol stove.

I admit that I'm "magnesium challenged"...maybe it's supposed to be easy to use but I don't have much luck with it. It takes forever to get a decent pile of shavings, then they like to blow away. And when they do actually light they seem to "flash" burn before I can get anything done with them. And it's not a cheapo Dones bar, this is a big soft block from Firesteel.com. I even got a bag of mag turnings from eBay; those suckers need exposure to naked flame.

No, for me it's 1) Tinder Qwik, 2) cotton balls (naked, waxed or PJ'd), 3) fatwood and/or 4) Weber grill lighter cubes. To light them I've usually got a lighter, a firesteel, a Spark-lite and matches. What can I say...I'm a pyro!

BTW, forgot jute cord. I've had good luck with it, but it does seem to wick up moisture out of the air fairly easily. If I have jute it's gotta be sealed in something.

Phaedrus,
I posted something for the "magnesium challenged".
Look up my post "Doan Magnesium Firestarter" from 01/31/2010
This might help you rediscover the benefits of the magbar.
Hope this helps, my friend.

Pharaoh.

Cotton balls soaked in Coleman White Gas stored in a used Granger G-Wax tin.

You get a jet of yellow flame about 2 feet high which burns for about a minute from a single cotton ball.

At the moment I am using tinder quiks. I tried dryer lint before and was disappointed in its performance. Luckily it was not an emergency when I tried it out. Perhaps it was from a batch with a lot of synthetic material. There was also not much of it there so perhaps there just wasn't enough of it. I had it filling the space left in the top of my match case. The tinder quiks, however, fit nicely in the same space so I replaced the lint with the tinder quiks and have been carrying them in all my kits since. I have noticed a lot of mention of cotton balls with Vaseline and would really like to try that out.

It doesn’t qualify as tinder, but I also try to keep a thin piece of corrugated-type cardboard in there (you can cut these to size from big mac boxes and some of the dominoes boxes as well as many retail store boxes – I have taken to checking every box I come across and squirreling the good ones away). Not only does it serve as an added boost to get larger kindling going, it also serves as a buffer between kit items where needed (for example to protect a water bag from being punctured by the end of a roll of wire). As always no affiliations and YMMV.

I've tried many different ones... I'm a big fan of Tinder Quik and Cotton balls with Vaseline. Sometimes I also use jute twine.

Mg is finicky. Good to add to another tinder tho. Birch bark is also great with another tinder.

With dryer lint, your best bet is to NOT use a fabric softener sheet. The residue can often make the link NOT burn or not burn well. Natural fibers, as someone else mentioned, works best.

I've tried all of these in winter conditions with moderate winds, approximating typical fire starting conditions.

Just wanted to state a side of warning with the often coghlans brand mag bars that the ferro rods are held in with a drop or two of glue and with enough force the ferro rod can be rocketed off the mag bar and in sufficient foliage lost.