I stopped following magic after Shadowmoor.

I've looked around a bit and everything seems OP.

What is the state of Legacy/Vintage now?
Is extended completely gone?
What broken decks/cards have come out?
What gimmicks have they spewed out?
What new card archetypes have they come out with?


Extra credit: Who was around for the last few days of the old mtg main forum [:cry:]? Terrible to let 15+ years of material and conversation go like that.

In order:
1.) Legacy and Vintage are still around (though only barely supported by Wizards). Mostly your best bet is that a local game store or a Star City Game affiliate is holding an event.

2.) Yes. It died so that Modern could live. (Modern is basically everything from Mirrodin forward.)

3.) You caught the birth of Planewalkers in Lorwyn. Jace, the Mind Sculptor became a thing after that. There are other cards as well, but that's a pretty decent highlight.

4.) Tons. We've got double-faced cards now with no Magic backing. We've got new borders on cards, full-art lands, a new Mythic rarity.....the list goes on. The latest thing in Kaladesh is that we finally have vehicles and a new form of resource with "Energy." Also before that We got a new mana symbol for colorless mana because that mattered for one set.

5.) Well they dropped Tribal (the card type) like a bad habit. While we haven't gotten any new card types, we have gotten a wealth of new subtypes.

EDIT: As for extra credit, I was there to see the old forums crumble to dust.

I don't play Legacy or Vintage, so I can't answer the first question.
Yes, Extended has gone the way of the dodo. Although there's an unofficial format called Frontier that is basically Extended right now (but aims to be Neo-Modern).
If bannings are anything to go by, Emrakul, the Promised End and Smuggler's Copter are some recent broken cards. You also missed Treasure Cruise, which got banned in every format except EDH/Commander and its Standard environment. Cat Lady is expected to be a broken deck soon (in some circles).
I'm not sure what really counts as a gimmick anymore.
I don't keep track of archetypes.

I was around for the fall of the mothership forums. They could have made an end-of-the-world movie about it, fashioned in the style of a large group of people crying out in a feeble attempt to reject the end of the world and then suddenly being silenced. With smaller outsider groups that did their best to save everything they could on board some ark-like structure before abandoning the world to find a new place.

0) OH MY GOD THEY KILLED CORE SETS AND 3-PART SETS ! THEY BASTARDS !
2) Ideas never die though. If you and a couple of friends agree to build decks from 5-blocks pool, no problems with that, right
3) Speaking of new set: we're probably going to get a black version of Lightning Bolt or Path to Exile: This Is Spaartaaaa Kick. Also known as Fatal Push.
4)
Colorless mana costs - may be paid from Sol Ring, but not from a basic land.
Infect - creatures dealing damage in form of poison and -1/-1 counters. A foundation of powerful modern u/g aggro deck based on pump spells.
Phyrexian mana - a colored mana that you can ignore by paying 2 life. I consider it nice, but lots of people believe it's often broken. Important cards I know are Dismember, Porcelain Legionnaire, and a recently-banned-in-modern Gitaxian Probe.
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn. Fifteen mana action girl that wins a game against an unprepared opponent in 99,999...% (And yes, 99,999... = 100 in normal math.)

Oh, yes ! Cool, isn't it ?
But that is usable only for tribal reasons - otherwise, there are utility lands that do all the same, and more.

Well, and EDH for budgetary/sanity reasons. Yeah you could find ~40 mono-grey utility lands rather than using any Wastes but do you really want to, especially when a lot of them are going to be Shimmering Grotto useless and having some Wastes lets you use "basic land" tech?

I was also around to see the very end of the old forums. I don't think that it was a big loss getting rid of the 15+ years of material. It quickly became outdated anyway. The loss of a centralized communications platform is what I find sad and most of all the people who were active there. In its final days the forum was over-populated with bitter trolls despite only having very few regular posters.

WotC: A 2016 communication strategy using social media but with a 1991 MTGO interface.

I was there to the end too.

We caught most everything worthwhile on the Internet Archive.

Oh, the forums ... learning about random generators while arguing with Bobus ... who had the absolute gall to call himself Silent while posting like crazy ... and I learned a lot about Limited there. Thanks again, Bubba and all the other community enthusiasts who did the work Wizos had no clue about.

I enjoyed the limited part of these forums while it was more active, and I like the 3CM game here. Otherwise, tweeting is just not my thing. I use my phone for phoning, thank you.

I think coming back to Magic after eight years might be harder than starting fresh. You will have all kinds of misconceptions, like blue is playable in Limited, spells matter more than critters, and so on. Metagame is solved on the Pro Tour these days, the pro teams mostly made rogue deckbuilding obsolete. And the Internet absolutely exploded with strategy content.

That is probably pretty far from the truth.

I'm still sad about the loss of Rules Q&A.

The Magic Rulings board at mtgsalvation is just as fast, just as accurate, and really has many of the same people as Mothership had, no?

you should play Commander/EDH

I have...a weird question. How much of YMtC was saved? I made a pw that made Squirrel Birds and someone drew tokens for it and I want that artwork back =(

There were some pretty major Crawls of the site, so I think you can find just about any thread in open forums? Groups are kind of spotty. I know Keeper made darn sure that art and F&S were taken care of but I don't know if there was a concerted effort to log YMTC.

Hmm, what's changed since Shadowmoor? That was I think 2 blocks before I started (In Zendikar).
Yeah, let's start with blocks:

• Shards of Alara- Actually 5 demi planes, each focused on a different three colour combination.
• Zendikar - D&D adventure world. Land matters theme. Considered one of the best sets of this decade. Turns out Cthulhu was sealed here. Most Cthulu-y cards are colorless and have a transparent background over full art.
• Scars of Mirrodin - The first block to revisit a plane. Phyrexians grow from Phyrexian microbes that contaminated the plane and take over. It is sad but awesome.
• Innistrad - Gothic horror world. Graveyard and tribal themes. Two sided cards that transform from one side to the other show up. Considered by many to be the bes block since Ravnica.
• Return To Ravnica - Speak of the devil! Ravnica's still Ravnica. It's still cool. Actually, nothing's changed at all. Still hasn't.
• Theros - Greek myth world. Enchantment creatures get a set.
• Tarkir - Wartorn Mongolia experiences time travel plot, becomes dragon-ravaged Mongolia. 3 colour theme, but in combinations we didn't see in Alara. So many dragons.
• Battle For Zendikar - Here we switch to sets of 2 blocks instead of 3. That's supposed to be the new normal now.
  Back to Zendiakr to fight Cthulus. They kill two in antidclimactic fashion, but the ultimate Cthulhu escapes to...
• Shadow Over Innistrad - Gothic horror goes cosmic horror. They did the segue pretty nicely actually.
• Kaladesh - Steampunk India. Artifact theme and energy counters as a resource. Pretty cool, but the story ain't so great.

The big gameplay changes:

• Mana burn is gone.
• Combat damage is off the stack. It was still on the stack for Lorwynn, right?
• Lots of wording changes. Removed from the game is no "exiled". Comes into play became "enters the battlefield". Tokens are "created". Cards with multiple options list them as bullet points like in this list.
• Creatures have gotten more powerful and noncreature spells less powerful since Lorwynn.

Formats:
Legacy and vintage costs thousands of dollars to get into, and the format is dying from lack of new blood and official support. As the audience grows, those old cards have gotten more and more expensive.
Extended was killed off after WOTC realized that Mirrodin rotating out would wreck the format. They created modern, which is everything from 8th edition forward (thereby keeping Mirrodin from ever rotating).

OP stuff:
The biggest thing to break standard was probably Jace, The Mind Sculptor. It wasn't Mirrodin or Urza levels of crazy, but it was pretty crazy. Stoneforge Mystic also got the boot I believe.
The offending deck was called Caw Blade and won by strapping powerful equipment onto Squadron Hawks since you always had 4 copies for backup to get the equipment damage through.
They also printed some cards that caused problems in older formats. Mostly those came from New Phyrexia and Khans of Tarkir.

Other stuff:
WOTC's started releasing products that aren't standard playable. Multiplayer-focused decks, and sets of cards drawn from modern and legacy.
They've also introduced a new rarity- "Mythic rare". Mythics replace the rare in 1 out of every 8 packs and are expensive to buy as singles.
There's a basic land in each pack now. Return to Ravnica put dual lands in that slot though.
Prereleases got a couple of revamps. Most notably, you can now play your prerelease card at the prerelease. They did choose your colour/faction prerelease kits for a while, but had trouble balancing them against each other. Prereleases are just generally a bigger deal now.

The End
I was around at the forum death. WOTC really shot themselves in the foot with that one. Years of worsening management took there toll, and then came the "white death". Maybe Barinellos has some pics of the last software overhaul they did. One of the Expanded Multiverse fanficers (that's a thing now. Check out heir work; it's good) even wrote a story not so subtly about it. The forum's population nosedived and within a few months WOTC "Decided to concentrate their resources elsewhere".

Correct. Both of these happened in M10. Other fairly significant rules changes include a new iteration of the Legend rule (and planeswalker uniqueness rule) - now each player gets to have one, and when you somehow have more than one, you pick one to keep and the rest go to the graveyard.
Combat damage was replaced by the conga line of doom, or CLOD for short. When multiple creatures block an attacker, the attacker chooses the order in which the blocking creatures receive damage. Creatures with deathtouch were weirdly unaffected by this and could damage whatever, making targeted protection/regeneration useless if deathtouch was involved. This was fixed in the next rules update.

Ooh, a creature with both trample and deathtouch, now only needs to deal one damage to each creature blocking it before hitting the opponent with the remainder.

Also, both deathtouch and lifelink are now static abilities instead of triggered ones. As a result, additional instances of lifelink don't gain extra life.