You still have to give a budget, there is such a huge range. My best friend has a MOTU system (not a sound card, but a firewire interface really) that retails over $1500. You can also record successfully with a $15 soundblaster. That's a factor of 100 right there.
If you're using 57's and such, you are not going to get good sound going straight through a soundcard. You will want something with a preamp, a cheap Behringer mixer or something will work for this. Any mixer really, I have a 6 channel one that retails for less than $100.
Generally speaking, there's not a ton of difference among gaming oriented cards when in comes to recording. In general, a sounblaster live or audigy, any turtle beach card are all in the same range, perfectly passable for battle of the bands type demos, but not that hot for real recording. For a jump to $100 or so, you can get a M-audio audiophile, this is a big jump for recording, and you get rid of the damn miniplugs and get proper RCA ins and outs.
There are also tons of setups for sale that combine the functions of a soundcard and mixer, usually with a USB interface. These have the advantage of giving you preamps (of reasonable but not great quality) a control surface (sometimes letting you move a real fader instead of mousing) and software bundled in. Think about starting at about $250-300 and up for these things.