I really dug the Patriot when I first started building. It's a little cramped, but for $10 on FT the price is hard to beat. A guy on eBay sold me on the Infinite CLT2 and it's amazing - luxuriously big and very forgiving, with a huge drip tip and tons of air flow (for those cloud-chasing D2L pulls). But it's pricier. And definitely no M2L on that one!
I have found building for the iStick to be an additional challenge. Not that this is a bad thing, just bear in mind that you need to keep your build north of 1 ohm in order to make it fire... so you can forget about the fat wires (which may be a good thing if you're just getting started). My dripping sweet spot is around 0.6 ohms with some good-quality Sony 18650's. On the iStick, I'm running the CLT2 with dual 11-wraps of 28-ga and it hits amazingly well. But you need that extra space to squeeze the ginormous coils into the chimney!