The beta events are happening right now, chooms. WeirdCo and CD PROJEKT RED launched the Official Cyberpunk Trading Card Game onto Kickstarter back in March and the internet promptly lost its mind: $28 million pledged by 50,773 backers, with the $100K goal vaporized in somewhere around five minutes flat. That is not a typo. Five. Minutes. The Doctor is choosing to interpret this as confirmation that Night City is the only city that matters.

The game ditches the traditional life-point grind entirely. Instead, you’re running Gigs, stealing your opponent’s dice mid-combat, spending Eddies, and building Street Cred to drop the heavy cards. Your starter decks are “The Heist” (Mercenaries) or “Embracing Power” (Arasaka), and your roster includes V, Johnny Silverhand, Jackie Welles, Judy Alvarez, Adam Smasher, and more. Physically: real cards, real boosters, real deck-building, not a digital port slapped onto cardboard. The art is franchise-native, chrome implants and holographic dystopia all the way down.

Beta events run through September 20 at local game stores worldwide; hit cyberpunktcg.com to find one near you. Full retail release drops November 6, 2026. The Doctor will be there on launch day, deck pre-built, ready to be absolutely destroyed by someone half my age. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Science Saru (the studio that gave us Dandadan) just went and made the Ghost in the Shell adaptation the manga has deserved for thirty-plus years. Not a remake of the 1995 Oshii film. Not a sequel. An actual manga adaptation, beat for beat, with Motoko Kusanagi doing what Motoko Kusanagi does: being the most lethally competent cyborg in the room while Section 9 slowly assembles around her. Eight episodes in on Prime Video, episode 9 lands September 1. The Doctor has opinions about timeliness, and “fashionably late” is one of them, so consider this your warning shot.

Is it CyberPunk? Obviously. Does the Omega7Red Formulae apply? The Formulae was built for this. A full-conversion cyborg questioning the nature of consciousness inside a near-future surveillance state is basically the Formulae’s operating manual in anime form. If you have a Prime subscription and you have not started this yet, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life, but it’s wrong. High-5 to Science Saru. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, and Section 9 is about to prove it.