All of the decks in that article would be viable in paper tournaments. There are some marked statistical differences between the decks that tend to show up in the two spaces, for various reasons. I don't play online at all (actually, I do have an MTGO account, but I haven't bothered to spend money on it other than the initial purchase, and I've hardly touched the game). I also don't attend many tournaments at all (I played in one last year at some point, and posted about it). So while I'm decidedly a non-expert, I can identify some of the big differences, maybe...
1. Tournament structure. Vintage and Legacy events on MTGO aren't structured in the same way as tournaments are for "real" Magic. The logistics are totally different. I don't know all of the details or what effects this might have, but from what I've seen of discussion in Vintage and Legacy communities online, the effect that this has is that the statistics for MTGO can be skewed to show high performance for a particular card or deck all because one good player keeps grinding out wins in the regularly appearing, small-attendance MTGO events.
2. Card availability. More of an issue for Vintage than Legacy, but it affects both formats. Notably, a lot of people (myself included) think that Lands is a very, very strong deck in Legacy, but most players simply don't own any copies of The Tabernacle at Pendrell Vale, a key card in the deck. Online, this isn't a problem. Oddly enough, this can cause the environments online and offline to diverge even more than one might initially assume, especially in Vintage. Players on a budget can compromise and build different decks than they otherwise would. For MTGO, the cheaper costs allows those players to afford the generally more powerful decks, but this also means that the decks that happen to be bad against budget decks lose default predators, shifting the entire metagame. Also, Great Wall is not available on MTGO, so plainswalkers are able to run rampant online, whereas for the rest of us, their power is kept in check.
3. Rules differences. Decks that win by some sort of looping engine might be viable offline and unviable online. In a regular Magic tournament, if I demonstrate that I have a loop, I can simply state how many times I repeat the loop. Online, I'd be forced to click through each iteration, chewing up my own clock (because MTGO uses a clock for each player, like chess, rather than a general match timer shared by both players). So if my opponent isn't generous enough to concede on my behalf, my deck may not be practical.
). Any impressions? Are these being used in real life tournaments also (I think the article is for tournaments but now can't remember if they're just showing up in any kind of play)? If not, could they be?