New to card games!

Orzosro

I recently got into table top gaming again and I wanted to try my hand at card games!  I GM (can i use GM as a verb?)  a small group that plays Star Wars: Edge of the Empire but a few of us were interested in Deck Building card games specifically. Does anyone have a suggestion besides magic that we can start with. Being a HUGE Star Wars fan that I am I was also looking at the star wars card game.... for the fear of Star Wars overload (never gonna happen)  I want to go with a different genre, for now.

Please help a noob in need!!!

Trienco

Well, FFG has a whole bunch of different card games, all following the "LCG" model. The major difference: all base sets include the same cards and all expansions contain the allowed maximum number of copies of each card, so it's less like playing a lottery. All core sets also include enough cards for 2-4 decks, which usually means you can start playing right away.

The "core" of all their games feels very similar (except for Netrunner and Blood Bowl), so if you played one of them, it's easy to pick up the others. There's Game of Thrones/Warhammer Invasion for Fantasy, Lord of the Rings if you prefer co-op or solo play, Call of Cthulhu covers Horror, Netrunner does Cyberpunk and Blood Bowl Team Manager is... well, football with fantasy races.

A more exotic game is Romance of the Nine Empires, which is a (not-anymore) fictional game used in season 3 of The Gamers, modeled after Legend of the Five Rings and kind of a "reskin" of Legends of the Burning Sands (which was kind of a L5R spin off). Basically it's the most "self-contained" game, comes with 5 pre-made decks and a bunch of extra cards to customize and there's a chance it will never get any expansions (plus, it goes well with watching the The Gamers: Hands of Fate).

A completely different kind of deck building (as part of the game, rather than preparation for the game) can be found in games like Marvel Legendary, Thunderstone, etc. (co-op) or Dominion.

The Pathfinder card game is also purely co-op and the easiest way to describe it is "a persistent Munchkin on steroids". You level up your character, keep cards you get during the game to improve your deck between games and essentially follow a long story line. Just don't trust anyone saying "it's like an RPG that doesn't need a GM". Stats and rolling dice does not an RPG make...

Then there's a weird race of hybrid card/board games like Summoner Wars and Mage Wars, which are a bit like Magic with less abstraction. Cards/units are placed and moved around a board. Summoner Wars is a light game (the Masters Set comes with a whole bunch of decks), while Mage Wars will drown you in tokens.