Guild Wars 2

So myself and a few friends recently returned from like a year ago, and I have one friend who wants to play but doesn’t have the game. I was gonna buy it for him, but noticed there’s no digital download for STANDARD EDITION. Is this correct? Is it impossible to purchase just the standard edition digital download of this game?

There’s no need to purchase a ‘standard edition’ anymore. It’s been retired and replaced with the Heroic Edition, which is cheaper than ‘standard edition’ was and includes extra perks that weren’t in the initial release on top of that.