It really depends on what kind of flight you're taking and how much effort you want to spend learning about points programs.
One great and underrated card is the US Bank Altitude Reserve. It's essentially a $75 annual fee ($400 fee - $325 back on normal travel spend), includes a few priority pass lounge uses per year, and it's a pretty easy $750 towards travel. You just book through their portal iirc and don't transfer to any airline rewards programs.
For domestic flights that you'd take with a specific person you can't beat the Southwest Companion Pass, though you'd probably have to get two cards for that. I got the Companion Pass with my wife and the points from two credit cards ended up being worth ~$4,200. It's by far the biggest value in the points game. Note that two cards don't automatically get you a companion pass, and you'll have to look into that more. If you're interested I actually wrote up a pretty long guide to it at
https://bit.ly/2YaQ1Mf
If you don't like southwest then I'd advise against any airline branded cards. Instead look into the transferable points programs from Chase/Amex/Citi.
The Chase Sapphire Preferred/Reserve have the best transfer partners and wouldn't lock you into one specific carrier. The reserve does have a priority pass lounge membership, but it's not all that useful domestically imo. They transfer to SW, United, and American (ok, really British Airways but BA booking on AA is the best value you can get for short hauls). But also can be used to book normal paid tickets at a standard value of 1.25 cents per point for Preferred or 1.5 for Reserve which is worth more than a lot of points you'd transfer to, and is less work to get a good value. Keep in mind that the Reserve annual fee is really only $150 after the $300 credits on any travel (flight, hotel, uber, etc) and $100 coronavirus waiver and not the $550 you see. Actually looks like they're refunding groceries with that $300 at the moment due to coronavirus so yeah that annual fee is not so bad.
If you want to get into lounges then get the Amex Platinum. The Escape lounge in MSP is probably the best domestic lounge in the whole country, and one Amex Platinum can get three people in there ($45 walk up fee). The Plat also gets you into Delta lounges, and you can transfer points to Delta or several other carries. The card also gets you some decent hotel status with marriott / spg / hilton. If you want to go to vegas there's a way to match Marriott to Wyndham which then matches to Caesar's Diamond status. And that can easily be worth $250+ on one trip (a single $100 meal/year, two show tickets/month, free parking, cheaper/upgraded rooms, skip lines, etc). Plus Vegas has an Amex lounge that's pretty nice. There's also ways to get the $200 airline incidentals credit converted to something useful, but Amex has been cracking down on that recently and their $550 annual fee is hard to justify unless you'd really use the lounge pass often (or take two other people in a few times) and take an uber every month.
Citi just revamped their program and took away most of their card benefits. I don't recommend a card from them other than the double cash. I will say that for regular spending the double cash is pretty much as good as it gets (2% cash back on everything), and out of my 10+ cards it's what I use for most day to day purchases.
iirc IHG and Hyatt are a couple hotel cards worth having for their yearly free night, but not worth ever using to buy anything. IHG could also get you that Vegas Caesar's status I think. Marriott can transfer points to airlines, but their transfer values are pretty bad, and just google "bonvoyed" and you'll see a ton of reasons not to trust Marriott too much.
If I were living in MSP and planning to take several trips this year I'd probably order which card I want like this:
1. Chase Southwest cards for companion pass
2. Amex Platinum Charles Schwab edition (can cash out points with CS)
3. Chase Sapphire Reserve
4. US Bank Altitude Reserve
5. Chase Sapphire Preferred