A friend who was moving game a big box of her old quilt magazines, a wide variety of titles. Of all of them, I enjoyed American Patchwork the most, for the reasons Bree 123 mentioned. Boy, I turned down many pages in those mags, and am ready to scan those pages into my computer. My second favorite is Fons and Porter.
Magazines are about 75% advertising, and I'm just too cheap to pay for all those advertising. But I sure did enjoy going through them. And I shared them with the quilters and sewers in our community. Now that there's so many free patterns available in the web, I think magazines will gradually fade away.
Another idea, check out your local library. They may subscribe to several and you could get a feel for which ones you like.