MTG Salvation

Aug. 21, 2013: Cleaned up some grammar and misspellings, added a misuse of "good" at the top. More importantly: dorino pointed out that I'd made an error regarding the reasoning behind the September 2011 banning of Shahrazad; he or she was right, and I've noted that in the entry.
April 21, 2013: Added today's banlist changes to the list. Tap, untap. Tap, untap. I checked out the limited archives available for tptb.org/magic/formats/dragon.shtml, aka Alaska Magic; it's one of the earliest resources available. It's referenced in Sheldon's 2004 SCG articles.
April 16, 2013: I spent a few hours perusing the oldest EDH forums and websites I could find. I appended this information to the bottom of the post in chronological order (oldest to newest) in a spoiler tag; most of it's a lot drier than a simple list of banned cards. The only websites I could find archives for (I used Wayback Machine as my archiving service) were dreamwizards.com/edh.html and various iterations of the mtgcommander.net forums (including forums.dragonhighlander.net and edh.truespace.ca). One website, home.comcast.net/~kuranes/edh.html, had no pertinent archived material (but plenty of access-denied messages!); similarly, nothing from an older forum, csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~geduggan/phpBB2, has survived the inexorable entropy of the memory hole. Finally, I found a Google Group, but it was inaccessible and unarchived; similarly, a fan-run website (by Nomad) was flagged as an attack site, so I didn't investigate it and won't add its URL here. Dedicated searchers can find it in the Rules Discussion forum at mtgcommander.net.

NOTES: This is just a list of cards that have been banned or errata'd. Starting with November 2006, the source is the mtgcommander.net forums; before that, the sources are various. Dates come from either the timestamp afforded by the forum post or the date the website was archived. (In other words, the dates aren't strictly accurate; take this as more of a general timeline.) Non-mtgcommander.net sources are noted as follows:
Alaska Magic: AM
Dreamwizards: DW

October 2002; AM
Collector's Edition, "Promotional cards", poker cards and silver-bordered cards are banned. (I'm assuming poker cards are the 52-card, Magic-backed standard playing-card decks given to early DCI members.)
Unique Portal and Starter cards are banned. (This means Portal and Starter cards that don't share a name with "standard" Magic cards.)
Vintage-illegal cards are banned.
Test of Endurance is banned.

May 2003; AM
Judgment wishes (Burning Wish, Cunning Wish, Death Wish, Enlightened Wish and Living Wish) are banned.

April 2005; DW
Ancestral Recall is banned.
Balance is banned.
Black Lotus is banned.
Biorhythm is banned.
Library of Alexandria is banned.
Mox Emerald is banned.
Mox Jet is banned.
Mox Pearl is banned.
Mox Ruby is banned.
Mox Sapphire is banned.
Panoptic Mirror is banned.
Sway of the Stars is banned.
Time Walk is banned.
Upheaval is banned.
Worldgorger Dragon is banned.

December 2005; DW
Crucible of Worlds is banned.
Shahrazad is banned.
Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant is errata'd to trigger at 1.5 times your initial starting life.

February 2006; DW
Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind is banned as a general.
Heartless Hidetsugu is banned as a general.
(See the expanded list: These are also listed as banned in May 2006 in the official forums.)

November 2006
Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind is unbanned as a general.
Kaervek the Merciless is unbanned as a general.
Heartless Hidetsugu is unbanned as a general.
(Changes to restrict general kills to 21 points of combat damage allow these generals to roam the wilds again.)

March 2007:
Coalition Victory is banned.
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary is banned as a general.

July 2007:
Riftsweeper errata'd so it can't target generals in removed-from-game zone.

September 2007:
Shahrazad removed from the banned list (but still de facto banned, since it's banned in Vintage).

November 2007:
Beacon of Immortality unbanned. (Like I said in the intro, there's a pre-2006 history.)

February 2008:
Recurring Nightmare is banned.
Kokusho, the Evening Star is banned. The Internet bursts into flames. Five years of burdensome injustice commence.

June 2008:
Limited Resources banned. Responses include, "That's a thing?" and, "That wasn't banned from Day 1?"

September 2008:
Erratas removed.
Grindstone is banned.
Karakas is banned.
Lion's Eye Diamond is banned.
Protean Hulk is banned.
Riftsweeper is banned.
Test of Endurance is unbanned.
No one notices the swelling ranks of banned cards because Kokusho is still friesh in their memory.

December 2008:
Time Vault is banned, finishing the 9-in-8 massacre, in which nine cards were banned in the space of a single year. The lone survivor, Test of Endurance, still has flashbacks and trouble sleeping.

March 2009:
Metalworker is banned.
Tinker is banned.
Crucible of Worlds is unbanned.
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary is unbanned. Satan gleefully reassembles his EDH deck.

June 2009:
Fastbond is banned.
Gifts Ungiven is banned.
Braids, Cabal Minion is banned as a general.

September 2009:
Riftsweeper is unbanned, thanks to the COMMAND ZONE. None can be targeted in the COMMAND ZONE. It's not a DANGER ZONE.

December 2009:
Grindstone is unbanned.
Painter's Servant is banned. It still regrets tagging in Grindstone.

June 2010:
Channel is banned.
Staff of Domination is banned.
Tolarian Academy is banned.
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary is banned as a general. Satan stopped playing when the format got too mainstream and casually dismisses the ban as "the RC selling out."

December 2010:
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is banned.
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is banned. (Had to use a colorless ban the second time.)

June 2011:
Worldgorger Dragon unbanned. True to predictions, it quickly joins Ad Nauseam and Hermit Druid as the one of the format's most broken decks.

September 2011:
Shahrazad is banned. (As dorino pointed out, the format's still tied to the Vintage banned list; in light of the September 2007 banning, I don't really understand what this ban was all about. I can't find a reference to opening an exemption for Shahrazad. I'll chalk it up to being one of the universe's mysteries. Pyramids, Nazca lines, Shahrazad banning.)
Erayo, Soratami Ascendant banned as a general.
Lion's Eye Diamond is unbanned.

June 2012:
Griselbrand is banned. Griselbrand admits that he "probably had it coming. I'm kind of a douche."
Sundering Titan is banned, briefly reminding everyone that this card exists. (And I guess angering and relieving some people, if comments are to be believed. I, of course, only trust my truly infallible memory, and the only memories I have between 2007 and September 2012 are drunken brawls over Kokusho.)

September 2012
Primeval Titan is banned. This decision "won't be universally popular," Sheldon dryly notes.
Worldfire is banned.
Kokusho, the Evening Star is unbanned and banned as a general. People still complain, but now it's about day-to-day problems, not the soul-crushing injustice of the Kokopuffs ban.

April 2013
Staff of Domination is unbanned. It taps the staff or it gets the hose again.
Trade Secrets is banned. Clearly, Coca-Cola or Boeing got to the Rules Committee.

NOTES: The dates on much of this information are sketchy, particularly dates on forum postings. Between edits and some apparent weirdness in the several server transfers the information's had over the years, you can't trust the timestamps. However, the dates do seem generally accurate, and allow readers to construct fairly specific timelines.
ALSO: Any information in this section from the dreamwizards.com/edh.html (Dreamwizards) and tptb.org/magic/formats/dragon.shtml (Alaskan Magic) websites are marked DW and AM, respectively. Neither site up any longer, but both were archived; dates refer to the date the site was archived, NOT the date the information was posted. I used Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) to access the information.
FINALLY: For mtgcommander.net posts, the post's title is in quotes. RA denotes it lives in the Rules Announcements subforum; RD means it can be found in the Rules Discussion subforum. I'll eventually get to other subforums, but the Rules Discussion subforum is a huge amount of information on its own. Don't hold your breath.
AND FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: I'm also using information from Sheldon's Jan. 2, 2013, article "The Genesis", which was published on Star City Games. (It's the one linked at the top of the post.) Anything from that source is marked TG. Sheldon's dates are very unsticky; don't take them as gospel. (Sheldon notes that much of the article's dates are from memory; he and other format pioneers didn't record much of their interactions. They were playing a game, not building a worldwide format, after all.)

1996
"WAAAAAAY back in 1996", April 5, 2010, mtgcommander.net Random Chatter subforum
"Elder Dragon Legend Wars," a variant that would take years and years to actually play out, is published in The Duelist. It's possible that this is one of the inspirations for the Anchorage Elder Dragon Highlander game that Sheldon was introduced to. It's also possible that the two formats developed independently; the Elder Dragon Legends were fairly iconic. (For those not familiar, the Elder Dragon Legends – Chromium, Nicol Bolas, Vaevictis Asmadi, Palladia-Mors and Arcades Sabboth, were among the most sought-after cards in the pre-block era. Their reprinting in Chronicles and consequent price nosedive was one of the major impetuses for the Reserved List; oddly, they still haven't regained much value, despite their iconic and rare nature.)

Stardate unknown, but before October 2002 – TG
When Sheldon's introduced to the Elder Dragon Highlander format in Anchorage, Alaska, it's a) a 5-person game; b) using the five elder dragon legends for generals; c) truly Highlander (ie, even basics are restricted); and d) without a formal ban list (although Test of Endurance and Judgment wishes are verboten, and mass nonbasic hate are right out). It's essentially a half-dozen or so people playing their own version of Magic. The exact timeline of the agreements and bans isn't known, but they were in place by August 2004.
Other rules:
You can't make mana that's not of your general's colors. (You could include off-color cards.)
If a general would be exiled, it goes to your graveyard instead.
Life totals begin at (200/number of players). (Note that 200/5 is 40 life: It's probably no coincidence that this is the life total we have now. I'll ask about that later.)
If you take 21 points of damage from a general – not necessarily combat damage – you lose.
Your general starts as 1 of the 100 cards; it doesn't begin the game exiled. (This is the kind of rule that players in 2002 might have accepted as read, but it's got to be spelled out for us today. I think it's worth noting: The early days of the format, noted as before 2007 in Sheldon's article, were much looser and fluid.)

Oct. 15, 2002 – AM
Collector's Edition, promotional cards, poker cards and silver-bordered cards are banned. (Poker cards are probably from the Magic-backed, 52-card standard decks given to early DCI members.)
Portal and Starter cards with unique names are banned.
Generals are reserved (no more than one player in a group can use a general).
Generals must be a legendary creature from the Legends set; decks cannot contain more than one legendary creature from the Legends sets.
It's unclear, but "You may only play spells, or activate abilities that are 'in-color' for your General."
If a general would be exiled, its owner can place the general in his or her graveyard instead.
Any player who takes 21 points of damage from a single "Elder Dragon" loses the game.
Test of Endurance is banned.

Stardate unknown, but after October 2002 – TG
Sheldon's first suggestion is to ban Biorhythm. Games were devolving into Biorhythm wars. (It's a shame Ashcoat Bears wasn't printed at this time.) His second suggestion was to unrestrict basics. Both ideas are roundly shouted down.

May 9, 2003 – AM
Judgment wishes are banned.
Poker cards are no longer explicitly banned.

Stardate ~2003 – TG
Sheldon and his new playgroup unrestrict basic lands. (He moved. Quiet in the peanut gallery.)

Stardate August 2004 – TG
Sheldon publishes an article on Star City Games' website (http://www.starcitygames.com/magic/misc/7933_Ask_the_Judge_08202004Feature_Friday.html) talking about this great new format called Elder Dragon Highlander; it's played at Worlds 2004 (which ran Sept. 1-4, 2004). The banned list, according to the 2004 article: Test of Endurance and the Judgment wishes. Post-event bannings, according to the 2013 article: Balance and Worldgorger Dragon – both for being "miserable to play against." (His words, not mine.)

Stardate unknown, but after August 2004 – TG
At some point after this, the general began games exiled and could be cast from exile; the 6-mana minimum cost to play generals is instituted specifically to counter Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary as a general. (Lower-cost generals can be played, but they cost at least 6 to cast from exile.)
Judgment wishes and Ring of Ma'Rûf are unbanned. (It's assumed the ring was banned with the wishes before; article's silent on that point.)

Oct. 8, 2004 – SCG article, http://www.starcitygames.com/php/news/print.php?Article=8223
This article has a timestamp to tie down the events in the last entry. Judgment wishes and Ring of Ma'Rûf are unbanned, but can only fetch cards that were exiled during the course of play. Biorhythm and Beacon of Immortality are on the watch list – this is the first mention of such a list. Rules that start generals in exile, allow them to be cast from exile and set general's minimum casting cost are also laid out here. (Personally, I'd say this is the birth of the EDH format as we know it.)

April 22, 2005 – DW
Basic lands not restricted.
Cards banned in Vintage are banned in EDH.
Generals are reserved during league play. Once claimed, other players can't play them as a general or as 1 of the 99.
Cards in the deck cannot have a colored mana symbol in their mana cost that's not in the general's mana cost; off-color costs (such as kicker) can't be paid.
Starting life totals are (200/number of players).
Generals begin exiled and can be cast from exile. Regardless of its cost, an exiled general costs a minimum of 6 mana to play. (Emphasis mine).
Exiled generals are shuffled into their owner's library.
Players that exile their own general can choose to shuffle it into the library or exile it.
A player loses if he or she suffers 21 points of damage from a single general.
Wishes can't get cards from out of the game (they can only hit exiled cards).
Banned:
Ante, manual dexterity cards
Ancestral Recall
Balance
Black Lotus
Biorhythm
Library of Alexandria
Mox Emerald
Mox Jet
Mox Pearl
Mox Ruby
Mox Sapphire
Panoptic Mirror
Sway of the Stars
Test of Endurance
Time Walk
Upheaval
Worldgorger Dragon

Dec. 17, 2005 – DW
Cards with mana symbols anywhere on the card that aren't part of your general cannot be included in your deck. The alternate casting cost on Fifth Dawn's Bringer cycle is exempted.
Generating mana of a color that's not in your general's mana cost now results in adding that much colorless mana to your mana pool.
Generals have protection from Karakas.
Banned:
Crucible of Worlds
Shahrazad
Errata:
Rune-Tail, Kitsune Ascendant's ability triggers at 1.5 times your initial starting life.

Feb. 12, 2006 – DW
Banned:
Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind (as a general)
Heartless Hidetsugu (as a general)

May 2006
Oldest mtgcommander.net Rules Discussion, Rules Announcements forum posts.

May 9, 2006
“Banned Generals”, RD
Three banned generals (and their December 2006 unbanning) are listed, but the post does not list the date they were banned. (I suspect this is one of the mis-dated posts.)
Banned:
Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind
Heartless Hidetsugu
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary (Comments in thread indicate Rofellos' inclusion may have been accidental.)

May 25, 2006
“Rules updates”, RD
First mention of an option to exile generals when they go to the graveyard.
Unofficial ban announcement for Yawgmoth's Bargain.

July 22, 2006
“Cari's rules page”, RA
Announcement of removal of Dreamwizards EDH site.

Sept. 5, 2006 – DW
Dreamwizards site not archived after this point. There appear to be several rules discrepancies in this archive's screenshot; since it was archived after the site's removal was announced, I'd take anything it says with a grain of salt.
The secondary site listed in a July 7, 2006, posting (home.comcast.net/~kuranes/edh.html) has no pertinent archives.
General reservations abolished. If a player would play a legendary creature that's a) not his or her general and b) has the same name as another player's general, it's sent to the graveyard as a state-based effect.
If a general would go to the graveyard or be exiled, shuffle it into its owner's library. (This rule is particularly perplexing, and I believe it's incorrect.)
General protection from Karakas disappears from page, but no notification regarding its status in game.
(Google Group was used at this point for some discussions; I neither have access to the group, nor does Wayback Machine archive it. You'll have to bug Sheldon and Co. for anything pertinent from those discussions. Pertinent in this context doesn't mean, “Why did ya'll do x or y?” Pertinent means, “Were rules maintained there and nowhere else?” Don't go bugging the guys and/or gals over why they banned something five-plus years ago.)

Oct. 10, 2006
“Generals with Suspend?”, RD
Discussion on alternate costs and flash on generals; no ruling offered or consensus made. Comment No. 2 is the oldest reference to generals using a “General zone” or costing an additional 2 mana each time it dies.

Nov. 22, 2006
“Rules Updates: Legal Generals and General Damage”, RA
Dying to 21 points of general damage limited to combat damage.
Unbanned:
Niv-Mizzet, the Firemind
Kaervek the Merciless (no record of this being banned)
Heartless Hidetsugu

Dec. 8, 2006
“General Recursion”, RD
Discussion about nature of replaying generals shows the 2-mana-per-cast rule wasn't universal by this date. (See Oct. 10, 2006, and March 2, 2007.)

Jan. 5, 2007
“Ban Vote: Survival of the Fittest”, RD
Earliest extant (probably informal) “banning philosophy” document. Ban Ki-moon lays out the rationale. (Survival of the Fittest wasn't banned, on a 6-2 vote.)

Feb. 13, 2007
“Fruitcake Elemental?”, RD
Discussion of Fruitcake Elemental and silver-bordered cards. Nothing of import comes from the discussions; I noted them because it shows how malleable the rules still were at this point.

Feb. 21, 2007
“Changing the Rofellos Rule”, RD
Discussion of dismantling the minimum mana cost rule for generals.

March 2, 2007
“General Recursion”, RD
Announcements hint at changes to minimum mana cost for generals and a Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary ban.

March 8, 2007
“Rules Changes!”, RA
Combat damage from generals counts toward 21 total, regardless of controller. (Unsure if this is a clarification or a new rule.)
Players begin game with 40 life.
Removal of the minimum mana cost rule for generals.
Generals cast an additional 2 mana for each time they're cast from exile.
More explicit (and explicitly formal) discussion of banning principles.
Banned:
Coalition Victory
Rofellos, Llanowar Emissary (as a general)

May 23, 2007
“Poll: Banning Sol Ring?”, RD
Thread itself doesn't feature any changes, but Panoptic Mirror's ban is explained: During Atlanta playtesting, Sheldon and Gis played 1-vs.-1 EDH with 100 life totals. After these games, they decided the card ought to go.

July 2, 2007
“Riftsweeper”, RA
Errata:
Riftsweeper can't target exiled generals.

Sept. 18, 2007
“Minor rules changes”, RA
Removed rules that change how a general can be exiled based on who controlled the effect; any time a general would go to the graveyard, its owner can choose to exile it. I believe this rule was originally implemented sometime around the March 8, 2007, changes, but don't have an exact date.
Unbanned:
Shahrazad (This isn't a true unbanning; it was removed because it was de facto banned after the card was removed from Vintage's card pool.)

Nov. 26, 2007
“Beacon of Immortaility unbanned”, RA
Discussion of banning occurs in Rules Discussion subforums, “Beacon of immortality”, Nov. 6, 2007.
Unbanned:
Beacon of Immortality

Dec. 12, 2007
Earliest date archived for edh.truespace.ca. URL was discovered from archived redirects from csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~geduggan/phpBB2, which were the forums linked to on Dreamwizards. Much of the information on these boards is inaccessible or redirects to today's live site (mtgcommander.net). In any case, this proto-forum doesn't appear to be very active, and the threads seem to have been carried over faithfully to the current site.

Jan. 25, 2008
“Bringer of the [blank] Dawn”, RD
Post No. 7 offers an explanation of why Bringer cycle no longer has an exception. This is not a rules committee post, so take the given reasons with a grain of salt. Genomancer confirms their exclusion from all but 5-color decks in the thread's final post.