Collectible card games were all the rage for a while. Combining multi-player tactical rules with the ability to buy new cards to beef up your decks, this was a windfall for game publishers, particularly Wizards of the Coast, who originated the genre with Magic, perhaps the best such game. Alas, CCGs also proved to be their own undoing, as a speculators' market arose leading to capital problems for everyone. Distributor issues in the wake of the Star Trek: The Next Generation CCG are rumored to have led to the downfall of venerable role-playing giant TSR, which sold out to Wizards (which itself later sold out to Hasbro, ironically because Hasbro wanted to own the Pokemon CCG). A few CCGs are still out there, but by now the fad has passed.
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Illuminati: New World Order

This game replaced the strategy game version, Illuminati Deluxe Edition (although that version later came back into print). Once again, the idea is for players to take over the world by controlling many parodies of real-world organizations (or by meeting a special goal different for each player). The concept of money is gone, which I think makes it a little more enjoyable, but I now that the game has undergone two very major revisions, I think it's starting to creak a bit under its own weight.

I think this is an okay game. It seems to now be out of print, although copies of all its cards were eventually issues as the INWO CCG: One With Everything Factory Set, also now out of print.

Magic: The Gathering

Magic, of course, is the original, prototypical collectible card game. It's a fantasy milieu in which each player is a wizard. Players form armies of creatures in an attempt to destroy their opponent's wizard. With hundreds (if not thousands) of cards out there, many out-of-print and very expensive, this can be a great time- and money-sink, but also allows for a huge amount of variety.

Although there are many Magictournaments around, my friends and I play friendly games. We frown on decks which are simply killer decks, i.e., that rarely lose but have no finesse to them (fireball decks, for instance). We emphasize having fun and doing clever things, and we're always tuning our decks and trying to come up with new themes. I started playing around 1995, when the Ice Age expansion came out, and played for several years, but stopped around the time the Weatherlight expansion came out. I kept my cards because it's still fun to play from time to time.

I think this is a good game.

Mythos

Chaosium's flagship product is the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game, which is based on the writings of horror author H.P. Lovecraft and his ilk. Mythos is a collectible card game in the same milieu. Each player is an investigator who ends up in the middle of horrific situations involving Lovecraft's creatures, people and settings (mostly in the 1920s and 30s in New England). Although a player can attack and beat up other players, the real goal is to complete "adventures", which are special cards representing stories which give you extra points if you've played certain cards.

The cards are rather ugly, and the art feeling generally more amateurish than that in Magic.

I actually haven't played this game yet. Which might be a good thing, since it's now out of print.

A cyberpunk-ish computer network game in which one player is a corporation, and the other is a "runner", basically a computer hacker trying to break into the corporation's data banks to gain information. Each player uses a different deck with different (and incompatible) cards, which is an interesting concept in CCGs. The cards strike me as somewhat homogenous: The corp has agendas and lots of ice and basically wants to protect himself, while the runner has icebreakers and resources to attack the corp. Contrast this with Magic, where each player has to work equally hard on offense and defense.

In its defense, though, I actually haven't played this game yet. Turns out it's out of print now anyway.

Sim City

Loosely based on Maxis' computer game of the same name, this CCG features each player building part of a modern city (all players work on the same city). The cards are very ugly, featuring photos rather than artwork, and putting all the cards next to each other makes a ghastly-looking conglomeration. And game doesn't really play very well, in my opinion. It has the feel of a game that was rushed out quickly to capitalize on the CCG craze.

I think this is an awful game. It was later repackaged as a non-collectible game, which I never played. Both versions seem to be out of print.