Continuously buying booster packs is only a problem only with games like Magic.
There are lots of card games where you just buy a base set and an expansion now and again. And the vast majority of board games don’t require constant investment.
I bought Dropmix for my niece for Christmas. It's an NFC-based card game made by Harmonix and Hasbro. It's actually an interesting music mixing game that works really well... but..
While it comes with 60 cards, the biggest criticism that I've seen about the game is how expensive the booster kits are and how they are packaged. To get all aspects of a song, you may have to buy multiple booster packs. I get that the song rights are built into the cost, but they cost as much or more than individual songs do off iTunes, and one card usually has only one part of a song (i.e. vocals, guitar, percussion, etc).
With netrunner I'm not continually buying packs, but rather data sets and expansions. Plus with rotation I need to keep that up. There's no randomness, but there is ongoing cost.
There are lots of card games where you just buy a base set and an expansion now and again. And the vast majority of board games don’t require constant investment.