Cool art, indeed. I think am interested in MtG now, so ma brain sparked a bunch of newb questions. How one start with the MtG these days? Can one use old cards from the 90's? Which type of boosters is best to buy at the moment? Can one mix cards from different years & boosters to create deck with them? I primarily thinking of playing with others in ma town in real life.
EDH/ Commander is a multiplayer format (the standard is games with 4 player pods) that pretty much has a stranglehold over casual paper Magic these days. You should try to hook up with your local scene to check - I would be surprised if any of the 1v1 formats are close to being as popular as Commander. The most popular 1v1 format is Modern, followed by Pioneer in a very distant third place. Another option if you have a lot of old cards is to make a draft cube.
Commander is a 100 card singleton format - only 1 copy of any card is allowed, besides basic lands and cards that specifically ignore card limits. Cards from every set back to Alpha are legal, although there is a banned list. Usually proxying hard to acquire cards is acceptable, especially since the M30 debacle. One card in your deck is a legendary creature that is designated your Commander, and that creature spell begins the game in the "commander zone" instead of in your deck, and can be cast and recast from there. Your commander also designates your deck's Color Identity, which hard limits the colors of spells in your deck. For example, if your Commander is Dakkon Blackblade, every spell in your deck must be black, blue or white. If your Commander is Ihsan's Shade, every spell in your deck must be black. There are other rules but that's the gist of it.
With or without older cards, Commander is an extremely accessible and relatively inexpensive format for anyone. There are probably nearly 100 Commander preconstructed decks in print, generally full of playable cards. Also, reprint sets in the past few years have prioritized reprinting cards popular in Commander like Sylvan Library and Sol Ring. So whether you want to get cards from a preconstructed product, booster packs or singles, the majority of cards are plentiful and inexpensive. And if not, they are proxy-able. Green is usually considered the best color in Commander. The recommended website to learn about Commander is edhrec.com .
Modern and Pioneer are traditional non-rotating 1v1 formats. Modern allows cards from sets from roughly the past 20 years (starting from Mirrordin/ 8th Edition, i.e. when the card borders changed) while Pio allows cards from roughly the past 10 years (Return to Ravnica/ Magic Origins). Modern has a couple of Tier 1 decks and a large variety of Tier 2 and 3 decks. However it's mostly dominated by fast combo decks that are difficult to interact with in the card pool. The way to win in Modern is to simply win faster. The other distinguishing feature of Modern is that fetchlands are legal. Green is usually considered the best color in Modern. Two sets - Modern Horizons and Modern Horizons 2 - were printed in recent years and featured enormously powerful cards (many Legacy playable cards) the currently dominate Modern, so if you are interested in Modern those two sets as well as fetchlands are the place to start.
Pioneer is generally considered a more interesting and interactive format than Modern although it is also a pretty high power level format. WotC pretends that Pio is a midrange format but its actually also a fast combo format (any format without Force of Will is a combo format), with WotC banning combo decks anytime a dominant combo deck pops up. The lack of fetchlands as well as poor dual color lands in general means competitive decks are generally mono-color or 2 colors. Black is the best color in Pio, due to Thoughtseize, removal spells and tutors. The buy-in product for Pio are Challenger decks, which are 75 card preconstructed decks playable if not exactly competitive but contain some of the more relevant cards in the format. Overall it is a decent format but it's not very popular so its hard to find other players. Another con is that you end up spending a lot of money on bad two color lands, which feels bad.
Legacy and Vintage are the oldest 1v1 formats that allow cards from all the way back to Alpha. I wont dwell on them since its extremely difficult to find local players for either format and play is now mostly on Magic Online or a handful of major tournaments every year. Blue is the best color in both Legacy and Vintage (although Red is nearly as strong as Blue in Vintage).
Cube Draft is a casual format where you basically prepare a large box of Magic cards and find up to 8 players to play draft from the box. Its probably the best way to enjoy paper Magic these days, although building a good Cube is pretty challenging and time consuming (and expensive if only for the card sleeves alone). If you are interested, the recommended website is cubecobra.com .
