Getting started (Advanced) with Magic: The Gathering, and where to play
Online Communities

There are a variety of online forums for discussing Magic, some more popular ones are:


MTG Salvation
TappedOut (This one also has a popular deck builder you can use to share and get comments on decks you build)
MTG Fanatic
Commander/EDH


There are many more out there, this is just a few from a search for 'mtg forums'

Staying up to date

Many of the above discussion forums have sections for MTG news, including spoilers for new sets (which officially start about 2-3 weeks before the set's pre-release), announcements of upcoming products, changes to banned lists, and various other Magic related info. You can also find most if not all of it from the official Magic website.

If you just want to know what is in Standard you can use the What is in Standard? site and it will tell you. Note that you can use any printing of a card as long as it was printed in one of the Standard legal sets (So you can currently use the Shards of Alara version of Knight of the White Orchid since it was also printed in Magic Origins which is legal in Standard).

Other useful info

To find the location of a store to play at you can use Wizard's Event Locator. To find lists of popular decks in a variety of formats you can use sites like Starcity games or TCGPlayer. Generally sites with decklists will also have various strategy articles and other information like that.