Are these "Living" card games really any different than CCGs?
You still have to essentially collect cards, but the distribution model has been changed. You start by buying a starter set, which costs about $40 and has enough for two people to play right out of the box with a lot of different deck permutations. But instead of releasing supplemental cards via 15-ish card booster packs that are entirely random, supplemental cards are released via (now) 60-card "Asylum Packs", which contain 3 each of 20 fixed cards. So once you buy that Asylum Packs, you don't have to buy it again because you now have all the cards from it and as many copies of each card as you can legally play in any one deck. Asylum Packs cost around $15 each, but when you consider how many booster packs of a traditional CCG you'd have to buy at $4 each to get a full playset of 20 specific cards, the LCG model looks really good. The other nice feature is that you can find out exactly what's in each Asylum Pack, so you can just buy the packs with the cards that interest you most, and avoid the ones you don't want.
I don't actually play the game, I just learned all this doing some research, so anyone who actually plays can feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. I'd like to get into it casually once I find someone else that wants to play!