Best non-collectible strategy card game?

Poker.

I like it because of the mental conflicts between players. "what's he got??" and then racking your brain over it.

But, as for a commercial game, I don't really know. I haven't play many card games except for Magic the Gathering, which is collectible. Check out Steve Jackson games (www.sjgames.com). He builds alot of card games, and they are relatively good. I like Munchkins personally.

Rob

What do you recommend and why?

Kreitler

For two players, Lost Cities is hard to beat. It's simple, has a lot of depth and a lot of hard decisions. You can play nasty or you can play politely. A skilled player will almost always beat a non skilled one, so luck is minimalized. It plays very quickly too.

-Darke

Krietler,

I guess it depends what type of game you are looking for - strategy card game is a broad category.

Are you looking for a 2-player or multi-player? What types of mechanics are you looking for? An elimination fighting game? A hand-managment game?

Not knowing exactly what you are looking for, I would recommend Citadels and to a lesser extent Bang!

Both of these have gone over well in my group, but Bang! is a little too random to give a high recommendation (not much strategy). Citadels has secret role selection and character powers.

Speaking of which, I had a recent playtest of my game (Castle Raiders - which I would classify as a strategy card game) and one of my playtesters brought up that he liked the Citadels game better in the middle of the game.

I told him my game is not quite there yet. Maybe someday.

Saint Petersburg
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/9217

While Munchkin is a pretty fun (and funny) game, I don't know if I'd put it in a list of "strategy" games.

Poker is pretty hard to beat as far as strategy is concerned, well at least at a higher level and played with real money, but i'm assuming you are looking for something more themed.

Along the lines of abstract games:
For Two players, I could easily recommend Lost Cities.
For 5 or more, I would recommend the President and Asshole "balanced card occurance variant", The Great Dalmuti.

For two players, can I suggest "Scarab Lords" or "Minotaur Lords" (I think both from Fantasy Flight), and, more significantly, "Blue Moon". All by Reiner Knizia.
"Blue Moon" is skirting dangerously on the edge of the definition of "non-collectible" however :-)

My memory of the Jack the Ripper game tells me that it works fine with 2 to 4 players but worked best with 4 as the Evidence mechanic was too easy to control with just 2. But it's a somewhat hazy memory.
#2. the Rue Morgue, works relatively well with 2 to 4 but is probably best with 4.
#3, Jekyll and Hyde is explicitly and only for two (and is probably my favourite of the series.)
#4, the Al Capone one, is really only a four-player game but is fine nevertheless.
Meanwhile, "Wyatt Earp" (which is not strictly part of the Mystery Rummy series but shares far too many traits in common!) is clearly best with 3, which is bizarre but true. It's got something to do with the deck size and card balance. It certainly feels rather too random with 4.

I think I've never tried it 2 player, and I've only played it one night, but that night we had a bunch of guys over at Harvard playing this until all hours of the morning one night. All agreed it was a really fun game for 4 players.

The problem is that I found it hard to define what is exactly a strategy game. On my point of view, a strategy game is a war game or a representation of a war ( for example : Chess and Go ). But I know that not all people see it this way, so this is why I submitted Munchkin more as a "best NCCG" than "best strategy NCCG".

While its not a battle rich game like MTG I think Titan: The Arena is a fun game.

The Magic, to me, of Magic the Gathering is in that you get to design your own super-cool uber "ROCK" deck (which is tons of fun in iteslf) just to be stomped by my so-so "Paper" deck.

While I agree that there is lots of greed in the design I think it would be hard to capture this in a non-colectible game.

- Dwight