Cyberpunk TCG doesn't play like most trading card games sitting on a store shelf right now.
There's no mana to tap, no life total to track, and no deck of lands diluting your draws.
Instead, the entire game turns on a set of physical dice and a currency you generate by selling your own hand.
Here is how the win condition, the economy, and the card types actually work together once you sit down to play.
Each player uses a personal set of six dice, a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, and d20, all representing Gigs that start the game in your Fixer area.
Every turn you roll one die into your Gig area, and the first player to start their turn with at least seven Gig dice under their control wins the game outright.
Eddies, Night City's in-world currency, come from selling a card out of your hand once per turn rather than from a separate resource card type.
No matter what a card's listed cost was, it's only ever worth one Eddie once sold, which forces a real decision about whether a card is more valuable played or cashed in.
Legends are your three centerpiece characters, shuffled face-down at the start of the game and flipped through an action called Call a Legend.
Units fight for Gigs on the field, Programs resolve an instant effect before heading straight to the trash, and Gear attaches to a Unit or Legend to boost what it can already do.
RAM isn't spent during a turn the way Eddies are. Instead, it's a deckbuilding limit tied directly to the colored RAM values printed on your three Legends.
Every card you run in a given color needs a RAM value at or below the total your Legends provide in that color, which is what stops a deck from running every powerful card in a color at once.
A Unit that attacks can target a spent rival Unit to start a fight, where the higher power card wins and a tie defeats both, or it can swing directly at the rival's Gig area to steal a die outright.
Higher-power Units steal extra Gigs in the process, gaining one additional die for every ten power above the first, which rewards building toward big single threats as much as a wide board.
If neither player has reached seven Gigs by each player's seventh turn, the game enters Overtime, where the very next player to reach a majority of Gig dice wins instantly, even mid-effect.
Overtime exists specifically to stop long, grindy games from stalling out indefinitely once both players have built a reasonably stable board. It's a sudden-death rule, so the first player to reach seven Gigs during Overtime wins on the spot, with no further steps needed.
Every card lists its cost in the top left corner and its type label in the top right, with a Legend's RAM value printed as part of that same corner.
Power sits in the bottom right corner for Units, and timing triggers like Play, Call, Attack, and Defeated appear in a distinct highlighted style so you can spot exactly when an effect fires without rereading the full card text. Learning to scan for these highlighted keywords before reading the rest of a card's text speeds up play considerably once you're familiar with the icons.
Ready Units can't be attacked directly, which means most of your board sits safe on defense simply by staying untapped, but that also means they usually can't stop an attack on your Gigs either.
Only Units carrying the Blocker keyword, or effects with the Quick keyword, can actually interrupt an attack in progress, which is why those two keywords matter more than raw stat lines once you're deciding what to leave ready.
Seven or more at the start of your turn.
Eddies, generated by selling a card from your hand once per turn.
Legend, Unit, Program, and Gear.
No, RAM is a deckbuilding limit set by your three Legends, not an in-game resource.
Understanding how Gigs, Eddies, and RAM interact is the real foundation for every deckbuilding decision that follows. Keep your first set of pulls organized in an EVORETRO 9-pocket binder while you figure out which colors you want to play.
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