Cyberpunk TCG Tournament Rules: The 7-Card Sideboard

Every deckbuilding breakdown on this site — the RAM ceiling, the 30-card sealed floor, the 40-to-50-card constructed main deck — has been describing half a decklist. WeirdCo published the other half on 25 September 2026, when it posted the complete Cyberpunk TCG Tournament Rules: a standing reference document for judges, tournament organizers and players, distinct from the Comprehensive Rules that govern the game itself. It answers questions this vertical has been flagging as unpublished since August, and it does it with a document that is, structurally, nothing like what came before it.

Update, 1 November 2026: this post describes the 25 September first release. The live Tournament Rules have been revised since (the rules feed shows a 28 October update), so several details below have changed: Appendix A is now a full penalty guide, the card-ban list has been rewritten, sealed now has four formats, single-elimination round times are set, and WeirdCo has published a Judge Program. Where the live text differs, a bracketed "1 Nov" note says so. For the changes in one place, read the October 2026 rules update, and for the program, the Judge Program post.

Two days earlier, on 23 September, WeirdCo also detailed the Welcome to Night City Pre-release Kit — six Retail Booster Packs, three random Legend cards from a ten-card pool, a Gorilla Arms promo, and a full polyhedral dice set, all carrying a foil "WTNC 2026" stamp exclusive to the kit. Beta Events wrapped up on 20 September; Pre-releases were scheduled for the weekend of 30 October. That kit is what a Pre-release deck is built from. What the Tournament Rules document supplies, for the first time, is the actual legal framework a Pre-release deck gets built and played under — and a great deal more besides.

What WeirdCo actually published on 25 September

The Tournament Rules page is stamped "LAST UPDATED SEP 25, 2026" and runs four numbered sections plus four lettered appendices: Overview, Tournament Responsibilities, Tournament Play, and Judge Policies & Procedures, followed by Penalties & Infractions (a placeholder at the time; see the 1 November note below), Current Card Bans & Restrictions, Match Rules, and Format Rules. WeirdCo's own announcement post frames the timing plainly: "Now that we've announced full details about our Edgerunner Open Regional events, we're ready to share the complete Cyberpunk TCG Tournament Rules with you all," and adds that a Judge program and testing process are coming in October. [1 Nov: the Judge Program has since been published and is now Appendix E of the live document.]

This is the document the Comprehensive Rules breakdown predicted would have to exist. That post's rule 7.3.6 note flagged a legal deck as deferring to "current regulations for the game format" without naming them. The 25 September document was that regulation, and it turns out to say more than anyone expected.

The sideboard nobody saw coming

Here is the sentence that rewrites every constructed decklist on this site. Section 2.1.3 defines a legal tournament decklist as: first and last name, Melee.gg/CyberpunkTCG ID, exactly 3 Legend cards, and "Composition of Deck + Sideboard (40-50 Card Main Deck + 7 Card Sideboard)."

Appendix D.1 confirms it as a constructed deckbuilding requirement in its own right: a 40-to-50 card main deck, exactly 3 uniquely named Legends, a maximum of 3 copies of any card — and "a sideboard of exactly 7 cards." Section 3.4.4 spells out how it works: sideboard cards may only be main-deck cards (no Legends), you swap cards in and out between games of a match rather than adding to your deck's total size, and you get two minutes to do it between games of a best-of-3 round, or three minutes before a best-of-1 round starts. After the match, you are responsible for returning your deck to its original decklist configuration — the rules put the burden of noticing a mis-sideboarded, therefore illegal, deck on the player who has it, not just the judge.

None of the site's constructed guides have accounted for this, because nothing published before 25 September mentioned a sideboard existed. The RAM deckbuilding guide worked out that a constructed deck buys exactly 6 RAM across three Legends and needs enough legal cards to fill 40 to 50 slots inside that ceiling. From 25 September, a tournament-legal deck needs enough legal cards, at that same RAM ceiling, to fill 47 to 57 slots — the main deck plus a 7-card sideboard drawn from the same colour and RAM restrictions, since Appendix D.1 states plainly that "cards in a constructed format deck must follow any and all deckbuilding guidelines and restrictions... including but not limited to RAM values." A splash colour capped at RAM 2 was already a tight fit; it now has to supply sideboard cards too.

One exception is written in on purpose. Appendix C.2.2 defines a "Quick" best-of-1 match type for LGS-level Pre-release or Night City Brawl events: "a constructed format legal best-of-1 deck with no sideboard, however all other deckbuilding and material requirements must be met." So the sideboard is the default for constructed play, not a universal law — a store running casual Quick matches can opt out of it entirely, while anything run as best-of-3, or as a "Competitive" best-of-1 premier side event, carries it.

[1 Nov update] The live decklist clause (section 2.1.3) now reads "40-50 Card Main Deck + 0 or 7 Card Sideboard", while Appendix D.1 and section 3.4.4 still say exactly 7 and require the sideboard to stay at 7 cards after swaps. WeirdCo has not reconciled the two, so treat 7 as the constructed requirement and ask your organizer if you are considering running none.

Two mystery promos got named, then dropped from the list

As of 25 September, Appendix B listed three cards under a single heading: "The following cards currently have textless versions printed that are not currently legal for tournament play, however will become legal when a card with an identical name and subtitle are printed in an official Cyberpunk TCG expansion set": Lucyna Kushinada — Fresh Beginnings, David Martinez — Built Different, and Rebecca — Having a Moment.

[1 Nov update] The live Appendix B no longer lists Lucyna Kushinada: Fresh Beginnings or David Martinez: Built Different. Only "Rebecca - Having a Moment" remains in the textless-promo clause. This post cannot say why the two names were removed, only that the live text no longer carries them. The sections below describe what the 25 September version said.

That 25 September list closed two gaps this site had been carrying. Cards you cannot pull from a booster flagged a bare mention of a third Nova Rare named "David" in WeirdCo's fulfilment FAQ, with "no reveal post, no stated eligibility and no announced acquisition route." The Edgerunner Open tickets and prizing post went further and named the Top 8 Regional prize as "Lucyna Kushinada," then reported checking all 151 cards in the database and finding "no entry under that name in any form."

On 25 September I re-checked the card database directly: neither David Martinez nor Lucyna Kushinada returned a result. As of 1 November that is still true of the public card database, while Rebecca now has an entry (Red Legend, Nova Rare, Set 1 Promos #005, textless). So the Rebecca promo is catalogued; Lucyna and David are still absent.

On the Chicago Top 8 prize: when this post first ran, it noted that the winner would be getting a card that could only become legal once a full-text version shipped in a numbered set. WeirdCo has since announced Set 2, Edgerunners: Burn Bright, for Spring 2027, so no full-text version can land before the December Chicago event. Check the prizing post for the current prize wording rather than relying on this paragraph.

The card ban list, as first published

Appendix B's second list on 25 September was shorter and stranger: two categories of product were flatly not legal for tournament play — "Cyberpunk TCG Alpha Kit, except the Nova Rare alpha cards" and "Test prints which feature outdated and inaccurate mechanics and card descriptions" — plus one specific card, named on its own line: "Jackie & V — Chooms to the End."

I searched the card database for it on 25 September and found zero results. Unlike the textless promos, it carried no "not yet legal" clause: it was banned outright, with no path to legality stated.

[1 Nov update] The live Appendix B has been rewritten. The "Jackie & V: Chooms to the End" line is gone; a search of the whole live document for "Jackie" returns nothing. The Alpha Kit clause now reads that Alpha Kit cards (marked with an [ALPHA] symbol in the card number) are not legal, with three named exceptions that are legal: Saburo Arasaka - Stubborn Patriarch (a029), Goro Takemura - Hands Unclean (a030) and Yorinobu Arasaka - Embracing Destruction (a031). Test prints and "NOT LEGAL" staff cards (marked with an "N" in the card number) remain excluded. WeirdCo's marketing-materials library lists an Alpha Kit product entry, confirming Alpha Kit is a real, physical product that predates Welcome to Night City's Beta and Retail print runs.

Two open questions this document closed, and one it did not

Two "what is still unknown" bullets, from two different posts, got real answers (the sealed copy limit from the Tournament Rules, the constructed Legend-name question from the Comprehensive Rules). A third, on sealed Legend names, is now unverifiable.

The sealed copy limit. Both the Organized Play breakdown and the sealed deck rules post flagged this as unpublished in either direction. Appendix D.2 settles it for the sealed formats it defines: "A player's main deck may contain any number of copies of any non-Legend unique card." Sealed decks carry no 3-copy cap at all — a real difference from constructed, where copies are capped at 3.

Unique Legend names in constructed. The RAM deckbuilding guide raised this for constructed, where the database's 27 Legends share only 24 distinct first names. Appendix D.1 requires "exactly 3 Legend cards that do not share the same name," and on 25 September this post called that phrase ambiguous. That was wrong, because the Comprehensive Rules answer it. A card's subtitle is not part of its name (rule 3.9.2 in the 1 September text, renumbered 3.9.4 in the 29 October text). Rule 3.10.2 uses the example that "V: Streetkid" and "V: Corporate Exile" have the same name. Rule 7.3.1 says "You cannot use multiple Legends with the same name," with the same V example. So the base name is what counts: two V Legends, two Goro Takemura Legends, or two Jackie Welles Legends cannot share a constructed deck.

Unique Legend names in sealed. The 25 September text said in Appendix D.2.1 that "Legends do not need to have unique names." [1 Nov] I could not find that sentence in the live sealed rules, which now say only that Pre-Release players choose exactly 3 Legends and that 6-Pack players choose up to 3. Do not rely on the unique-name exemption without checking the live text.

The second sealed format, and two more since

On 25 September, Appendix D.2 defined two sealed formats, not one. "Sealed Kit" rules (D.2.1) are what this site already covered in detail for Beta Events and Pre-releases: a kit with six boosters, three guaranteed Legend promos, one Nova Rare promo and dice, building to a 30-card floor. "6-Pack" rules (D.2.2) were new: an LGS or side-event format using six bare booster packs with no guaranteed Legend pack at all.

That changes the one assumption every deckbuilding post on this site has made without stating it: that a player always has exactly 3 Legends to work with. In a 6-Pack event, you "choose up to 3 Legends" from whatever your six packs happen to contain — you might open zero, one, two or three. WeirdCo's fix for the shortfall is mechanical rather than restrictive: "For every missing Legend in a player's Legend area at the start of the game, they add the top card of their deck face down as a blank Eddie" — before play begins. Whiff on Legends entirely and you start the game with three blank Eddies already banked, rather than three Legends you could otherwise Call or spend for value. Everything else about the format matches the Sealed Kit rules: up to three colours regardless of Legend colours, no RAM ceiling, a 30-card floor, unlimited copies of any non-Legend card.

[1 Nov update] Appendix D.2 on the live page now defines four sealed formats: Pre-Release (D.2.1, the renamed Sealed Kit), 6-Pack (D.2.2), "Chroming Up" (D.2.3) and "Chooms" (D.2.4). Chroming Up uses 8 booster packs: 6 sealed packs for deck construction plus one extra pack after each of Rounds 1 and 2. Chooms is a teams event, mainly a side event at Edgerunner Open Regionals, of three players under one captain. It can run as constructed or sealed, with a shared 18-pack pool in the sealed variant. The live 6-Pack text adds the blank Eddie at the start of the player's first turn, before they draw for the turn, rather than before opening hands.

The dice-check math

Section 4.1.2 is the most rigorous thing WeirdCo has published about this game, and it is worth working through because the numbers are more careful than they look at a glance. To flag a die as a possible cheat, a judge rolls it 10 times, then — only if something looks off — 24 more, then, if it's still suspicious, 46 more, for 80 rolls total. A die is flagged if any single face comes up this many times across all 80 rolls:

Run the standard-deviation math yourself (n = 80, p = 1/faces, a fair die's roll counts follow a binomial distribution) and five of the six thresholds land in a tight band, roughly 2.9 to 3.8 standard deviations above what chance alone would produce — a real, deliberate margin against false-flagging an honest die on a bad run. The d4 is the outlier: WeirdCo flags it at only about 2.1 standard deviations, a noticeably more trigger-happy bar than every other die in the set gets. Whether that is intentional — a d4 has fewer faces to hide a shave on, so a smaller deviation is easier to attribute to tampering rather than variance — or simply an oversight in a first-edition document, the rules do not say.

Separately, Section 2.1.4 sets hard manufacturing standards for legal dice: no shaving, filing, weighting or "spindown" numerically-ascending d20s, and any non-numerical symbol face must consistently represent either the minimum or maximum value across the whole six-die set. Day-2 competitors and players on stream may be required to switch to WeirdCo-provided dice regardless of check results.

'Time called' is not Overtime

The Comprehensive Rules breakdown covers Overtime — the sudden-death state that begins after two consecutive turns where both players start with an empty fixer area, usually around turn seven. The Tournament Rules add a separate, tournament-only clock that sits on top of it: what happens when the round timer, not the game state, runs out.

Round lengths on 25 September, by match type, were these. The single-elimination rows are the part that was inconsistent in the original: section 3.2.2 said single-elimination rounds are "always 75-minute best-of-3 matches" and set no time for a single-elimination best-of-1, while section 3.4.5 listed 50 and 75 minutes for the best-of-3 case.

[1 Nov update] The live section 3.4.5 now lists four round times: Swiss best-of-3 at 50 minutes, Swiss best-of-1 at 30 minutes plus a 3-minute pre-sideboard period, single-elimination best-of-3 at 75 minutes, and single-elimination best-of-1 at 55 minutes. Section 3.2.2 now says single-elimination rounds are "generally" 75-minute best-of-3 matches, and that the final single-elimination rounds of Edgerunner Open Regionals are untimed.

When time is called mid-game, per Section 3.4.5: finish the current turn, then both players get one full additional turn each. The 25 September text described a combined 5-minute cap on those final turns; the live text says players "will each have 5 minutes to complete their final turn," so check the live wording if the clock matters to you. If either player controls 7 or more Gig dice at the end of that second post-time turn, they win; otherwise the game is a draw, and the match result is whichever player has won more games. If time is called while a game is already inside Overtime, the live text says players begin round-end turn procedures but also keep Overtime scoring, and Overtime scoring is applied before Round-End scoring. In single-elimination rounds, if no winner is determined after the second turn, play continues until one player has more Gig dice than their Rival. Two different endings, two different triggers, easy to conflate if you have only read the Comprehensive Rules.

How a District Open actually gets approved

The Organized Play breakdown named Night City District Opens as running "from Set 2" at stores that "supported Cyberpunk TCG the most," with the host-selection mechanism unpublished. Section 2.3.2 filled it in on 25 September: "LGS-level TOs may apply to run Night City District Open events during the application period for each Cyberpunk TCG main set, which is typically 1-2 weeks following the release. Certain LGS-level TOs may be given priority based on metrics defined and communicated by WeirdCo prior to the opening of this application period." So it was a defined, recurring application window tied to every set release, not a one-time Set 2 launch decision. [1 Nov] The live 2.3.2 now says LGS-level TOs "may apply to run Night City Showdown and District Open events during the application period for each Cyberpunk TCG main set" and no longer gives the 1-2 week figure.

The live top-cut table (section 3.3) says a Top Cut is required for Night City District Open events and that, despite a capacity of up to 256, stores may elect to cut District Opens to Top 8. The 129-to-256 row reads Top 8, 3 single-elimination rounds (District Open), and the document notes that Edgerunner Open Regional and above numbers may differ based on event capacity. The generic Swiss-round table checks out against what this site already reported for Chicago's 2,048-cap Main Event: the 1,025-to-2,048 bracket calls for 11 Swiss rounds and a 16-player, 4-round single elimination — precisely the 8-Swiss-plus-3-more-for-18-match-points structure the tickets and prizing post described from WeirdCo's own event page three days ago. The two documents agree down to the round count.

One publisher-side inconsistency

Not ours to fix, but worth knowing before you plan around it: the Organized Play FAQ still read, as of 25 September, "It is recommended that Beta Events are three rounds, Best-of-3, 60 minutes each." The Tournament Rules document published that day sets the general Swiss best-of-3 round at 50 minutes, with no Beta Event exception carved out anywhere in its round-type table — Beta Events aren't a category in this newer document at all, because they concluded on 20 September, five days before it went up. WeirdCo had not reconciled the two pages — this was the second time this vertical has caught the OPFAQ and a newer official document disagreeing with each other rather than with one of our own posts.

Separately, and already flagged in this vertical: as of 25 September the Organized Play structure page still read "We'll share our full Edgerunner Open Regional schedule with you in due course," despite real venues, ticket waves and a full prizing ladder having existed on a different WeirdCo page for weeks. I have not re-checked either of those two pages for this 1 November update.

What was missing on 25 September, and what is still open

• Appendix A: Penalties & Infractions was a placeholder. Its only text was "IMPORTANT! Appendix A: Penalties & Infractions will be added at a later date." [1 Nov] It is now a full penalty guide: A.1 defines the penalty levels (Warning, Minor - Game Loss, Major - Match Loss, Disqualification), A.2 lists infraction types and suggested penalties, and A.3 sets out the Judge Philosophy.
• A Judge program and certification process. WeirdCo said in September that this was coming in October. [1 Nov] It was published on 16 October, and the live Tournament Rules include it as Appendix E. See the Judge Program post.
• Which specific printing ships as a stamped tournament promo, where more than one art variant of a card exists — a gap the tickets and prizing post already raised and this document does not touch.
• A numbered revision system. Like the Comprehensive Rules, the 25 September document carried only a last-updated date, not a version number — the same citation problem flagged in that breakdown.

Quick reference

Items marked "25 Sep" describe the first release; "1 Nov" marks what the live document says now.

• Published: 25 September 2026, at cyberpunktcg.com/tournament-rules. No version number, only a last-updated date. 1 Nov: revised since (rules feed updated 28 October).
• Constructed decklist: 3 Legends that do not share a name (base name, so two V Legends are not allowed), 40-50 main deck, max 3 copies per card, plus a 7-card sideboard — waived only for "Quick" best-of-1 LGS matches. 1 Nov: section 2.1.3 now says "0 or 7" while D.1 says exactly 7; the live text is inconsistent.
• Sideboarding window: 2 minutes between games of a best-of-3 match, 3 minutes before a best-of-1 round.
• Sealed decks: up to 3 colours freely chosen, no RAM ceiling, 30-card floor, unlimited copies of any non-Legend card. 25 Sep: two formats (Sealed Kit, 6-Pack). 1 Nov: four (Pre-Release, 6-Pack, Chroming Up, Chooms).
• 6-Pack format: no guaranteed Legend pack; a missing Legend slot becomes a face-down blank Eddie instead.
• Banned, 25 Sep: "Jackie & V — Chooms to the End," Alpha Kit product (except Nova Rare alpha cards) and outdated test prints. 1 Nov: the Jackie & V line is gone; Alpha Kit cards are not legal except a029, a030 and a031.
• Textless promos, 25 Sep: Lucyna Kushinada — Fresh Beginnings, David Martinez — Built Different and Rebecca — Having a Moment were listed as not yet legal. 1 Nov: only Rebecca remains on the list. The card database has an entry for Rebecca (Red Legend, Nova Rare, Set 1 Promos #005) but not for Lucyna or David.
• Dice checks: up to 80 rolls per die; flag thresholds run 28 (d4), 23 (d6), 20 (d8), 17 (d10), 16 (d12), 11 (d20).
• Round times, 1 Nov: Swiss best-of-3 50 minutes; Swiss best-of-1 30 minutes plus 3 pre-sideboard; single-elimination best-of-3 75 minutes; single-elimination best-of-1 55 minutes.
• Round-end (time called): one more full turn each; 7+ Gig dice at the end wins, otherwise a draw.
• District Open approval: LGS TOs apply during an application period for each main set. 25 Sep text added "typically 1-2 weeks following the release"; the live text drops that.
• Appendices, 1 Nov: A (Penalties & Infractions, now complete), B (Card Bans & Restrictions), C (Match Rules), D (Format Rules), E (Judge Program).