So in addition to there being not even the announcement of no changes for Vintage or Legacy, Gatherer no longer indicates whether a card is Vintage, Legacy or Commander legal (though it is supposed to be a glitch).
It's difficult to know what to read into and what not to with this stuff.
[rant]Ultimately, I have thought for a long time now that it is a weird sort of business interest for WotC to give Vintage at least some token form of acknowledgment, but that they don't want to do anything more substantial. It's not a format that does much to directly move sealed product for them. But it does help fuel the secondary market (somewhat) and that does indirectly help them make money. As long as they have Vintage, anyone can point to it and say, "Look, there is an officially sanctioned format where you can play with the old cards, all the way back to the beginning of the game, even the iconic Power 9 and other such relics." And if they were to foolishly leave that behind, they'd be abandoning a 23-year legacy as the first CCG and one of the most extensive, developed tabletop games ever. To the extent that this is even still true, the company is relying on a dedicated community of Vintage players, nearly all of whom, I'd bet, first got into the game in a year that started with the numbers "199." Players who are still invested in Vintage or Legacy are essentially carrying the game's connection to its roots for the company that makes it. Sever that connection and you're left with the most bloated, esoteric rules system of any game in history, an update schedule that is too intense for most players to keep up with, playtesting that is apparently inadequate (despite the presence of employees who have been at this whole cardmaking thing for 20+ years) for competitive play and must be shored up with bans, all in the only card game in the world that includes "mana screw" as a way to lose. It's a popular game with a lot of momentum, so perhaps severing all ties to the game's true depth and history wouldn't kill it in a year, but it would probably kill it in under five. Now, I don't remotely believe that anyone at WotC is stupid enough to want to break that connection, nor do I even know how they'd go about doing that if they were so inclined. But at least "no changes" in the announcements was some form of respect, however mild. It's a minor detail, but if it's an indication that they've forgotten where they came from, then the bigger details shall eventually follow, and they'll be in for a rude awakening.[/rant]
Definitely seems like MTGO is the source of a lot of Wizards data, hopefully it is representative of the rest of the community.
One of the more obvious points of contrast, which I've heard mentioned elsewhere, is with the Bomberman deck in Vintage. In paper, the deck can play normally and, once it finds its combo, promptly demonstrate the loop and win. Playing out the finish takes mere seconds. The MTGO client isn't set up for it, so the finish takes a whole bunch of clicking for each iteration of the loop, and you eat up your own clock (unless your opponent is generous enough to concede) to the extent that the deck is unplayable online. Now, Bomberman is not particularly prevalent in Vintage at this time, but it is
viable. From what I've seen the real differences run much deeper, but the case of Bomberman is flashy and easy to understand, demonstrating something definitive about the difference.
