Thank you for following along! I appreciate the time you took to play and to write out the feedback.
As you identified, due to the nature of the system sometimes it's not really possible to avoid damage. That's not something I want to eliminate entirely, because I think it's something interesting about the system and I don't want people to be able to dodge all damage (unless maybe they craft a really specific deck).
But I also understand that it feels bad, so I've got a couple different things in the works that I think will help mitigate it.
1) Like you suggested, some more abundant healing. That might come in the form of better healing cards, passive healing, a shop option to heal, or some combo of the three.
A lot of deckbuilding roguelikes in my experience are more about attrition, about preventing yourself by being slowly worn down by encounters. That's not really the direction I want to go with this, to the point where I've considered just fully healing after every encounter and lowering max HP significantly. Either way, more accessible healing is definitely on the todo list.
2) RNG mitigators - some of the next cards I have planned are ones that will allow you to draw additional cards, extend your foresight of the enemies moves, or allow you to adjust their length to better line up later cards. I'm hoping that those sort of utility cards will reduce the feeling of 'unwinnable' situations.
I was going to focus on some more UX changes, but thanks to your feedback I think I'll try implementing some of these items more quickly and see how the game feel changes.
Thanks again for the feedback, I really appreciate it!