I don't understand why they pulled everything off the wayback machine. Even if I disagree, I can understand the argument that it's not worth maintaining the old content themselves. But why stop third party archives?
Someone cannot--as in their request will be rejected--do that unless it's for pages that host personal information.
Archives still there if you have the original URL*. The problem is, like in many other sites, every few years they move everything around. So you cannot just copy-paste the new URL and expect to find the copies available in the older one.
*E.g. the one article that they're unable to find in the submitted one: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://magic.wizards.com/en/a.... Had to use Google myself to find this older archived URL.
The Internet Archive abides by the DMCA meaning it has to take down any material the copyright holder requests. WotC presumably owns the copyright for all the posted content, so very well could demand their archives taken down.
From your example I seem to be wrong. I tested one article link I found on the magic wiki and as it had only attempted archives that showed "page not available," I assumed they had been wiped.
I requested to purge the archive from a domain I have since the former owner put semi legal crap there. Apart from robots text, I was asked to set up one specific page with a hash-like url to signal that I am really, really sure about the purge. Thats all that is needed.
The process is described here: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-request-to-remove-som...
I don’t think we can expect corporations to maintain stuff for free for us forever.
They are gonna fuck it up at some point, if not now. In 50 years when hasbro and all its asset is buy by a agricultural tractor manufacturing company with no website and who don’t know what MTG is.