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Easily YuGiOh after Konami took over. The banlists quickly went from maintaining the health of the game to maintaining Konami's best interests for their future products.
They had the same old cycle: Create ridiculously OP cards and nerf your older cards, rendering your old cards obselete and nowhere close to being competitive.
Once everyone bought up the new OP cards, they skyrocketed in price thanks to the secondary market. I remember three copies of Tour Guide from the Underworld at their peak costing $500.
Once people got sick of them winning every tournament (formats would have three decks just dominate a meta), Konami would nerf the cards and just come out with more OP archetypes, starting the cycle all over again.
In my experience, Yu-Gi-Oh! gets it on both fronts. Their more recent online iteration for tablets/smartphones, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Generations, definitely falls into a bad place, and worse still it does so very early on in the game's campaign mode. As you progress to the point where you face Ishizu Ishtar, you're beginning to face decks that can quite literally OTK on turn 1. Campaign Mode includes duels against a laddering progression of about 45 or so characters. Ishizu is number 11. So you're one quarter of the way through the PvE mode and running into a brick wall with no way to progress...
...unless you go into PvP mode. In which case, as a bright note, as you continue to lose game after game over and over again, you get a free card for each loss. Booster packs cost 600 "Duel Points" each, each one containing five cards. A win can earn you anywhere from 300-800 Duel Points, based on meeting various conditions. A loss earns you anywhere from 20-100. So, a booster pack can cost you the price of one win, or the price of up to 30 losses. Also, rules don't seem to exist in this game. Cards that I recall being restricted in the past now don't seem to be.
And the physical card game, as many have stated, is almost as bad. Now, the one plus side of course is getting trade bait. If you can manage to pull one of the really amazing cards from a booster, you can get quite a bit for it in return.
I had already stopped buying cards at this time, but I lost literally all respect for Konami when they released Sixth Sense in Legendary Collection 4, waited for people to buy it up, use it in tournament, complain about it and E-Ban it... all in two short weeks.
Now I'm no card design expert, but there's no way they print a card that has a 33% chance of drawing FIVE OR SIX CARDS in a game like YuGiOh, at literally no cost, without the slightest idea that it would be broken. That one card was by far the star of the set and they pulled the rug right from under the players that spent all that money on it. Shameful.
Playing Decipher's Star Wars CCG back in the day was expensive as hell. It was the most amazing CCG ever, but damn did they milk you. Easily a couple grand to get a respectable collection that wouldn't hold you back playing in tournaments. There was no single card limit, which would drive up costs. A couple 60-card decks would run 3x Jedi Luke, an ultra-rare that went for $50..the other 57 not exactly all cheap commons. You needed two 60 card decks to play. Swapping a card or two wouldn't ruin you, but a "budget" deck was a bad deck.
The most expensive, or at least pain in the ass to build were decks playing 15+ copies of the rare Outer Rim Scout or Destroyer Droid, which could go for $20 a pop, weren't exactly available in bulk, and which you couldn't even expect to pull one if buying an entire box because of set sizes. Also, no set rotation and tournament formats not playing all cards being rare and short-lived meant you couldn't start new and just buy 2-3 expansions and be good to go; it was common for a deck to have at least a card or two from every set going back five years.
Plus, be glad to not have "re-packaging" in Hearthstone. Because they overprinted certain sets (Cloud City and Jabba's Palace) and needed to unload stock, you could find a heap of these cards in: Enhanced Cloud City, Enhanced Jabba's Palace, Jabba's Palace Sealed Deck, Third Anthology, Reflections, Reflections II, and Reflections III. These releases would come with a set of exclusive "Premium" cards that were generally stronger than a regular expansion and must-haves for players. So, to get the 12 Enhanced Cloud City cards (just single copies, mind you, where 2x at least a few cards was probably a good idea), you'd dish out $48 for four-$12 packages containing 3 new cards and four packs of Cloud City in which you already were throwing all but the best rares in the trash, and did not want or care about. Then they'd come up with another release to throw more Cloud City at you a few months later...I once had like 40 packs of tournament prize winnings in arrears given to me...Cloud City packs. I kept about five cards and let everyone else have a free for all on the rest. It would be like a Hearthstone "Enhanced Old Gods" release, with powercreeped cards like "N'Zoth with Tentacles" and "Angry Ravaging Ghoul", but you'd need to buy 7 Old Gods packs to get a couple new cards, even if Old Gods is now old news and you already have all the cards you want from the set.
CCGing since '98.
I would say magic: the gathering. Though standard may not cost hundreds of dollars, and sometimes it does, the interesting formats like modern, legacy, and vintage can cost 1000s if not tens of 1000s for one deck. A restricted list that prevents reprints of certain OP cards has caused massive price issues around the oldest formats, with black lotus costing upwards of 8k. (It's been a while since I've played, and it . might be cheaper, but you see the point.) the main issue with magic is that there is no such thing is free. Any card someone would just give to you is far worse than a bomb squad or magma raver in hearthstone. I spent far too much money on magic, and I never reached a competitive tier of play. I haven't played yu gi oh, but the fact that a modern staple like tarmagoyf sits at a cool $100 consistently is disgusting to me
yugioh is basically free to play though, you just download devpro an have unlimited online play with instant access to over 20k cards, no grinding or money required
After playing card games like MTG and Yugioh, I can't say hearthstone is pay to win at all. In order to build a competitive deck in some MTG formats, you need to spend a lot of money, and the same applies to YGO. Altough it may take some time, in hearthstone you're able to build a whole competitive deck without spending a single penny. Of course spending money will get you there really faster, but in other card games you can't even play without spending a lot.
MTG Vintage, by a lightyear. Those who haven't seen the price of a tournament legal Black Lotus are in for a heart attack.
MtG - Modern and Vintage are insanely expensive if you want to be competitive.
Great art can never be created without great suffering.