Cyberpunk TCG Tags: 39 Printed, 10 With Payoff Cards

Open the Cyberpunk TCG card database, tick the Tags filter, and you get a wall of 39 options: Arasaka, Maelstrom, Tyger Claws, Voodoo Boys, Valentino, Mox, NCPD, Trauma Team, Militech, Zetatech, Aldecado, Raffen Shiv, Maine's Crew. Gangs, corps and subcultures from across the setting are in there, printed on cards, ready to be built around.

Almost none of them do anything yet.

I pulled all 151 cards in WeirdCo's official database on 2 September 2026 — colour, type, cost, power, RAM, tags and full rules text — and cross-referenced every tag against every card's printed text. Thirteen cards name a tag. Ten of the 39 tags get named at all. Twenty-nine are, mechanically, decoration on a card that has nothing to do with them.

That is not a complaint. It is worth knowing before you build a first deck, because it means the obvious cyberpunk instinct — pick a gang, draft the gang — has one well-supported answer and a lot of traps.

What a tag does under the rules

WeirdCo's Comprehensive Rules define tags properly, which is worth reading before you write them off as flavour. The document served on 2 September 2026 carries 660 numbered rules across 11 numbered sections and an updated_at of 1 September 2026. Section 3.13 is the relevant one:

• 3.13.1 — "'Tags' denote a card's classifications."
• 3.13.1.1 — "When an effect includes a tag, it's referencing all cards with that tag."
• 3.13.1.2 — "In card text, tags appear in bold, fully capitalized."
• 3.13.2 — "Every card has at least one tag, and there is no upper limit on the number of tags a card can have."
• 4.11.3.2 — "A Unit or Legend does not inherit Tags or other characteristics from a Gear equipped to it."

Rule 3.13.1.2 is the one that makes this post checkable. Tags are rendered in card text in full caps, so a tag reference is machine-findable: scan the rules text of all 151 cards for a fully capitalised tag name and you have the complete set of cards that care. There is exactly one all-caps token in the whole pool that is not a tag — Deadman Transmitter's self-reference to its own name, defeat its "DEADMAN TRANSMITTER" instead.

Rule 4.11.3.2 is worth banking too: equipping a CYBERWARE Gear to a Unit does not make that Unit CYBERWARE. Gear tags stay on the Gear.

One card in the database appears to break 3.13.2: Rebecca: Having a Moment, the Nova Rare convention promo, lists no tag at all. It also lists no cost, no RAM, no power and no rules text — it is a borderless full-art card, so the entry has almost nothing to record either way. Every other card carries between one and three tags: 64 cards carry one, 66 carry two, 20 carry three.

All 39 tags, by pool size

Here is the whole thing. Colour columns are Red / Green / Blue / Yellow, and the last column counts cards whose printed text names that tag.

Two things fall straight out of that table. The deepest tag in the game, Ganger at 27 cards, has a single card that references it — and only as half of an "or" clause. And Netrunner, at 13 cards, has none at all, which is a strange place for the most iconic role in the setting to sit.

Maman Brigitte carries three tags — MYSTIC, NETRUNNER and VOODOO BOYS — and not one of them is named on any card in the database. Her text cares about Programs, not about who she runs with.

Thirteen cards name a tag

The complete list, with what each one actually checks:

Eleven reward your own tagged cards. Two check the opponent's board instead. And that split matters more than the raw count, because a tag that only appears in a rival-facing clause gives you nothing to build toward.

Arasaka is the best-supported tag

Four cards name ARASAKA, against two for the next-best tag. Three of the four look at your own board:

• Saburo Arasaka: Stubborn Patriarch (Green Legend, RAM 2, from the Embracing Power starter deck) — "Friendly ARASAKA Units have +1 power while attacking." With the reminder text right below it: units steal an extra Gig for every 10 power.
• Yorinobu Arasaka: Embracing Destruction (Red Legend, RAM 2, same starter deck) — "The first time a friendly ARASAKA Unit attacks each turn, draw 1. Then, if you have less than 20 ☆ (Street Cred), discard 1."
• Arasaka Emergency Radioport (Red Gear, cost 2, RAM 2, a Common) — when the equipped Unit or Legend is spent, you may look at a friendly face-down Legend, and "If that Legend is ARASAKA or has {Go Solo}, you may Call it for free."

The fourth, Yorinobu Arasaka: Steel Dragon (Red Unit, cost 7, power 9, RAM 3), reads "The first time an ARASAKA Unit is defeated each turn, draw 1" — note that it does not say friendly, so on its printed wording it triggers on either side of the table.

The pool backs it up. Nineteen ARASAKA cards, six of them Legends: Adam Smasher: Ender of Legends and Yorinobu Arasaka: Embracing Destruction in Red, Goro Takemura: Hands Unclean, Goro Takemura: Vengeful Bodyguard, Hanako Arasaka: Daughter of the Emperor and Saburo Arasaka: Stubborn Patriarch in Green. Green alone carries four of them, which is enough to fill your three-Legend requirement entirely from inside the tag. Red carries only two, so an all-ARASAKA Legend line has to be Green or Red-Green — mono-Red cannot fill the third slot from inside the tag.

And the colours line up with the payoffs, which is the part that is easy to get wrong elsewhere. ARASAKA sits 7 Red, 7 Green, 4 Yellow, 1 Blue; the payoff cards are three Red and one Green. A Red-Green Legend line reaches 14 of the 19 ARASAKA cards and all four cards that reference the tag. Compare that with the table further down: no other supported tag reaches more than nine of its own cards from the colours its payoffs live in.

Three tags only matter across the table

Take Control is the only card in the database that names AI, DRONE or VEHICLE, and it names all three at once — in a clause that checks the Unit you just hit. That is a two-eurodollar Green Program that draws you a card off the opponent's board composition, not a build-around.

So while the summary table shows AI, DRONE and VEHICLE each with one card naming them, none of the three has a single card that rewards you for playing it. The same caveat applies to CORPO's second reference: Johnny Silverhand: Never Stop Fighting "wins all fights against CORPO Units," which is a hate card, not a payoff.

Strip out the rival-facing clauses and the honest count is seven tags with a card that rewards you for playing that tag: Arasaka, Braindance, Corpo, Cyberware, Ganger, Merc and Rocker. Seven out of 39.

Nine tags are card-type labels

A chunk of the list is not factional at all. Nine tags with three or more cards are locked to a single card type across the whole 151-card pool:

CYBERWARE and WEAPON are what Gear is; BRAINDANCE, QUICKHACK and PLAN are what Programs are. Between them, CYBERWARE (13) and WEAPON (4) account for every one of the 17 Gear cards in the database, and BRAINDANCE (13), QUICKHACK (7) and PLAN (3) cover 23 of the 34 Programs. Read those as subtypes rather than gangs, and the "39 factions" number shrinks fast.

Militech and Voodoo Boys being all-Unit is more likely to be a small-sample artefact — four cards each — than a design rule. Do not plan around it.

The colour trap in every other payoff

Cyberpunk TCG's deckbuilding constraint is colour: your three Legends set a per-colour RAM ceiling, which is covered in full in the RAM deckbuilding guide. Tag decks collide with it hard, because for most of the supported tags the payoff card and the tag's card pool are in different colours.

CORPO is the clearest example of the trap. Nine of its 17 cards are Green — but the card that rewards friendly CORPO Units, Evelyn Parker: Beautiful Enigma, is Blue, and she is not CORPO herself. Her only tag is DOLL.

Evelyn is also the only card naming GANGER, and Ganger's 27 cards skew Red (12) while she is Blue. A Blue Legend slot spent on her reaches five of those 27 without a colour splash. She covers CORPO and GANGER on one card, which is genuinely flexible — she is just pointed at two pools she does not live in.

MERC is the widest gap of all. Twenty-four cards, ten of them Legends, spread across all four colours — 7 Red, 7 Blue, 6 Yellow, 4 Green — and the one card that names the tag, Pepe Najarro: Working Doubles, is a Green Uncommon whose {Attack} ability readies up to 2 MERC Legends if you control a value-pair of Gigs. It is a Legends-area effect, so the colour of the Legends it readies is what matters, not the four Green MERC cards. Worth reading twice before you assume the reach number applies.

What this does not tell you

Three limits on everything above, stated plainly.

The set is now fully numbered, but the database is still 151. Welcome to Night City's retail collector numbering runs 001 to 140, and as of 2 September 2026 all 140 slots are filled with no gaps. The two numbers this site logged as still blank on 31 August, 104 and 138, now resolve to We Gotta Live Together (Green Program, Uncommon, ALDECADO and NOMAD) and Towerfall (Blue Program, Epic, BRAINDANCE). The database's 151 rows are those 140 plus ten starter-deck exclusives and one promo. The Beta numbering runs higher because it adds alternate arts, which are new printings of cards already counted here, not new tag data.

Nothing here is playtest data. Welcome to Night City does not reach retail until 6 November 2026. Nobody has a public constructed metagame, and "seven supported tags" is a statement about printed text, not about what wins games. A four-card ARASAKA package could be worse than a pile of unrelated good cards.

The database's keyword field is empty. Cards clearly print keywords — the rules text across the pool uses nine bracketed ability words, {Play}, {Spend}, {Blocker}, {Attack}, {Quick}, {Go Solo}, {Call}, {Defeated} and {Adrenaline} — but the keyword filter on the official database currently offers zero options and no card row carries a populated keyword list, so this analysis covers tags only. Do not read the absence as meaning anything about the game.

Quick reference

• Cards in the database: 151 on 2 September 2026 — 73 Units, 34 Programs, 27 Legends, 17 Gear; Red 38, Green 38, Blue 38, Yellow 37.
• Distinct tags: 39. Cards carrying one tag: 64. Two tags: 66. Three tags: 20. No tag: 1 (Rebecca: Having a Moment).
• Tags named in card text: 10, across 13 cards.
• Tags with a friendly payoff: 7 — Arasaka, Braindance, Corpo, Cyberware, Ganger, Merc, Rocker.
• Tags with no card naming them: 29, the deepest being Netrunner (13), Maelstrom (9) and Valentino (8).
• Deepest tag overall: Ganger, 27 cards, one card naming it.
• Best-supported tag: Arasaka, 19 cards and four naming it, with six Legends split across Red and Green.
• Rules to know: Comprehensive Rules 3.13.1.1 (an effect naming a tag references every card with it), 3.13.1.2 (tags print in full caps) and 4.11.3.2 (equipped Gear does not pass its tags to the holder).