I'm obsessed with cardboard and plastic crack and would love to be able to talk about (and maybe play some on Tabletop Sim) with people who don't suck (especially Warhammer 40k, which doesn't have nearly enough leftists playing.) For card games I've been playing a lot of the Digimon TCG which is interesting and new enough to not have extreme nonsense like Yugioh or Magic.
What is it? What do you like about it?
It's a card game, but it functions very differently from the two models out there. Instead of buying packs of mystery cards like Magic or packs of predetermined cards like Netrunner and then using those to build a deck, you buy whole decks. Each deck is procedurally generated, fixed, and completely unique. You cannot add or remove cards from a deck - every deck has a unique name and card back.
This, imo, has a lot of benefits. There's no chasing expensive meta cards to fit in your build. You take the weird unique combo you got for $10 and that's what you work with, so it's accessible. The fun comes from learning what your particular deck does and mastering it. Cards are also individually much more impactful and dramatic (for the most part). Every deck has interesting and unexpected layers and every single game feels different.
The setting is also a fun kitchen sink, Saturday morning cartoon, science fantasy. The factions range from mutated wild animals and witches to little green men Martians to the Roman Republic with incredible technology and the people are dinosaurs.
I'm a big fan and it's super easy to just grab a deck or two and try the game out. Some people of course buy enormous numbers of decks, but I've been playing since the game launched in 2018 and have only 17 decks, so I've spent probably only $200 on the game including my nice set of tokens. My friends and I know each other's main decks by name and find the fun in trying to predict the unpredictability of the game.