8x8 is gone. It went out the window with Publish 39 in January 2006. (The publish notes merely say, "'Streakiness' in the random number generator should be improved. As a side effect, 8x8 will no longer work.") We still have GGS, though on the non-Siege production shards. (Siege has ROT.)
Using mage weapons for magery skill gains definitely works. If you're going to be working on magery, start your character with less than 50 magery so you can do the magery quest in New Haven. (Go to the magery training school and get the magery quest from the guy in the first room right behind the entrance.) After you get the quest and train magery up to 50, go back to the same guy and get your reward...an Ember Staff. It has -10 magery on it with no casting penalty. Works great for training magery. (Note: New Haven has some "accelerated skill gain" areas for characters that are on the new player quests. You know you're in one when you hear kind of a gong sound. You can also tell you're in one if you have the buff/debuff bar visible, because there's a special icon for that bar that pops up when you enter an accelerated skill gain area.)
Another nice spell channeling mage weapon to use for training is one of the 10th Anniversary artificats that drops in the anti-virtue dungeons. I believe it's called Jaana's staff and I think it has -20 magery and again, no casting penalty. They are probably a bit hard to come by these days because of the clean-up event, but go do some hunting in the old dungeons and perhaps you'll get lucky and have one drop in your pack.
I have little experience using golems for training. However, what I seem to recall hearing is that if you can find a 100% poison spell channeling mage weapon, you can use that to gain magery while hitting a golem. There may be more to it than that, though, so hopefully someone else will post with better information.
Lastly, if you're going to do inscription, there's a nice new player reward for that too, if you start it out at less than 50 and get the inscription quest at the New Haven magery school. The reward is an undead slayer spellbook that is filled with quite a few of the spells (I want to say half, but am not certain about that). I think the necro starting quest gives you a necromancer's spellbook as a reward, but I don't remember how many spells it has when you get it. Might not have all 17. However, any scribe with a decent level of inscription skill who has a full necro spellbook in their pack and necro regs can make the missing necro spell scrolls for you. They don't have to have necromancy skill to make the necro spell scrolls.
