After tabletop RPGs, video games, and board games, Cyberpunk 2077 is hacking into the TCG space with Cyberpunk TCG, a new card game that’s getting closer and closer to the launch of its Kickstarter campaign on March 17. Revealed back in December right here on IGN, we’ve now had some time to shuffle through some cards and learn how this latest adaptation of CD Projekt RED’s and Mike Pondsmith’s creation plays, courtesy of an alpha set that the folks at WeirdCo sent our way.
Having played some matches with the two included trial decks, let’s take a look at how exactly Cyberpunk TCG hopes to win some street cred and claim some territory in the already crowded card game market, alongside taking a first look at several new cards in the exciting TCG.
This “Merc Triptych” featuring Jackie Welles, V (Corporate Exile), and Viktor Vektor looks phenomenal. I love how much it leans into a gritty, watercolor aesthetic that especially nails the Cyberpunk vibe. I’m also particularly enamored by V’s corp look. You might even notice her sporting a particular silver hand, which is a wonderful extra touch. Not only are these cards fun to look at, but it’s also a great look at the game’s core mechanics and deckbuilding structure.
While Cyberpunk features many familiar aspects to other TCGs – using resources to pay for cards you play, attacking and blocking with summoned creatures, general gameplay styles tied to a color, etc – I have been surprised how much it also manages to feel quite unlike any other I have played to date, not just from looking at V, Jackie, and Vik, but also with playing around with the aforementioned alpha deck. Much of this I owe to how WeirdCo and the game’s designers have managed to infuse the source materials’ RPG-DNA into the TCG space, incorporating dice into the flow of the game, but in a way that, when you first hear about it, you may not have expected.
Each player has a pool of six dice, referred to as “Gigs,” set aside at the start of the game, and on each turn, you will pick one of your dice, roll it, and set it in front of you. These values act as your street cred, whose total value (from all your available dice) will unlock additional perks for some cards, with some effects even letting you adjust the dice. Other effects, such as “Jackie Welles – Pour One Out For Me,” allow you to manipulate the values of dice, too, triggering additional goodies and tricks for you to take advantage of. In Jackie’s case, you can adjust one of your dice’s values by 2, and if it is as high as it will go, it lets you draw a card. Managing your street cred dice holds a far more important factor to your game of Cyberpunk The TCG – these math rocks serve as your life, too.
To win a game of Cyberpunk, unlike many other TCGs, you aren’t trying to take an opponent’s life to zero; instead, you take the W whenever you start your turn in possession of six total dice. Whenever you attack your opponent and the attack lands, you can pick and steal one of their dice, and add its street cred to your own. You can even steal multiple dice, depending on how large an attack your card’s attack has, letting you steal even two or three at a time, turning each game of Cyberpunk into an intense game of tug-of-war that I found myself rather enamoured by. Having become a bit burnt out on the standard lifepoint or prize/shield direct of a vast majority of its peers.
Being a trading card game, ripping packs, constructing decks, and turning cardboard rectangles sideways are still front and center here. Cyberpunk features its own color system for its cards, similar to Magic’s color pie or Riftbound’s rune dominas, and heavily inspired by the skill trees featured in CD Projekt Red’s Cyberpunk 2077. In addition to the four colors featured, Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green, cards also come in four types. Legends (the leaders of your deck who you build your deck around, not too dissimilar to a deck’s Commander in Magic), Units (your grunts on the ground, doing the fighting), Programs (Cyberpunk’s equivalent to spells, one-time effects), and Gear (equipment you attach to improve your units).
Starting with the Legends, each deck includes three cards that are placed, face down, in a special area. These legends, with the initial offerings including the likes of V, Goro Takemura, and Yorinobu Arasaka, feature a colored RAM value that will dictate the strength and colors of cards you can include in your deck, with the total values and colors of all of your Legends together giving you your limits. Decks themselves must fall within 40 and 50 cards (not including Legends) with no more than 3 copies of the same card (no duplicate Legends though).
Astute TCG enthusiasts may have picked up on the fact that I didn’t mention any type of resource card, like mana, in my list of card types, and that is because one of the Cyberpunk’s interesting aspects is that instead of playing a Unit or Gear card, you can instead “sell” or place them face down and use them as a resource used to spend (i.e. tapping) to cast other cards, including your Legends.
Alongside the inclusion of the dice aspect, the element I have found most interesting about playing Cyberpunk has to do with the Legends, more specifically, how you bring them onto the board. As mentioned earlier, these leaders start the game face down in a dedicated Leader area. Once per player’s turn, you can spend resources to flip them face up and, in essence, summon them, unlocking their card abilities. Crucially, that timing is not limited to your own turn, meaning you can also reveal a Legend during an opponent’s turn, such as in response to an attack.
The thing is, however, unless a card lets you look at them, you have no way of knowing which of your Legends you are bringing out until you flip the card. Granted, you only have three Legends to pick from, but this sort of blindly casting a card as a major mechanic is something I can’t recall seeing in any other TCG I’ve played, and I’m still not quite sold on it. I’m all for the occasional infusion of chaos in my card games; heck, I play “Possibility Storm” and “Chaos Warp” in one of my Magic decks just for the hilarity, but having it be a constant factor in every game, I haven’t landed on quite how I feel about it yet. I don’t know if I like the idea of including cards among my rather limited 50 deck slots for the purpose of playing the memory game of seeing where that Legend I want to bring out could be.
I’m no stranger to TCGs, having been a Magic player for nearly 30 years at this point (gosh I’m old), and have played a wide variety of others from the Final Fantasy TCG, modern Digimon, dabbled in Pokemon, Yugioh, and even played a couple games of the old My Little Pony one, and the upcoming Cyberpunk TCG is already pulling off some surprises that have me excited.
I’ve found myself especially intrigued by the tug-of-war nature of the gig dice, with games feeling more tense, regularly, than most of the others. Additionally, while there are cards in both of the decks that deal with altering the dice and triggers from your Street Cred value, I’m excited to see full spoilers for the set and those beyond to see how this mechanic is really utilized and in what creative effects it will utilize.
While we don’t have long to wait for Cyberpunk TCG’s campaign to begin on March 17, if you want to give the rules a deeper dive, WeirdCo has the alpha ruleset available on the company’s website.
Fans of both Cyberpunk and trading card games should have this one on their radars, especially if you have felt that all the card games coming out lately feel a bit samey. For myself, I can’t wait to get my hands on more of these cards and really take these systems for a ride and see what they can do.
Scott White is a freelance contributor to IGN, assisting with tabletop games and guide coverage. Follow him on X/Twitter or Bluesky.
This article also features contributions from Robert Anderson, Senior Commerce Editor for IGN.
