Best way to make platforms

I was looking at the way Ashley says to do so in the tutorial: scirra.com/tutorials/253/how-to-make-a-platform-game/page-2

Basically using the animation editor to make a grid-based layout.

I was wondering whether using a tiled sprite instead, and then creating a masking layer, would work as well?

My 'platforms' in my game are suppose to look more organic, and would use a tiled texture. I thought it would be faster to create whole layers of the texture, mask them to the shape I want, and then either use collision polygon or a separate collision box for them.

Would it ultimately be more taxing on the game though? My platform is for PC, but would using so many effects to 'mask' the textures just bog my game down more?

Well, using Tiled Background will definitely speed up the game.

Yeah, that's what I thought.

The prob is that I'm not sure how 'masking' works in C2. I tried changing the blend mode to 'Destination Out', but sometimes this doesn't work and I have to fiddle different modes and different layers to get it to work like how the examples say they would.

Also using a giant sprite as a 'mask' might just kinda erase all the gains I get from using a tiled background.